The Kingdom by the Sea

"It's half-past eleven now," I said, "so the tide's only halfway up."

"It's more than halfway at Lyme," he said. His name was Warren Hawtree. "You might get stuck."

I said, "What do you think I should do?"

"I'll have to ask," Mr. Hawtree said.

He returned a few minutes later and said, "The old feller says you can just make it if you hurry. Otherwise you'll be caught by the tide."

I began to speak, but he shooed me away, saying, "Don't hang about!"

I set off, jumping from rock to rock. The fossils were visible on the rock surfaces—petrified snails on one slab and fossilized fish on another. All these rocks had tumbled from the cliff, and there was no law against hacking them to pieces, looking for an ichthyosaurus (the first one was found near here in 1811). But I did not pause. Lyme was shining gently above its stone pier. Behind me I could see where I had walked all the way from the Chesil Bank and Weymouth. The Isle of Portland was indistinct and blubberlike; it could have been a whale that had blundered against the Dorset coast to die.

Because of the tide, I was the only person on this stretch of beach. It was deserted and full of cracks and corners—another of the places where I expected to find a corpse: a murder victim, a suicide, or more likely someone who had accidentally drowned and been washed ashore. I had never had this spooky feeling in a wild country, in Africa or Asia, but on the British coast, whenever I was in a lonely place, I looked down and expected to see a dead man.

The tide was high near Lyme, washing against the cement slope of the seawall. There was room to walk, but the wall was covered in green sea slime, so it was very slippery. I crossed it on all fours and at Lyme I felt as if I had won a close race.

"That's where they made that film," a shuffling gent named Beaver said, and he smiled at the Cobb, remembering the film he had seen up in Swindon, where he lived. He had motored down to Lyme with the wife. He was not sure where he was headed. At his age, he said, you lived one day at a time. He wasn't thinking of retirement yet and certainly did not want to move to an elephants' graveyard, as he called Bournemouth and Worthing and the other places where oldies were clinging to the coast. But the grandchildren were in the Midlands, and the wife didn't drive.

Ellen Beaver said, "She was ever so pretty," thinking of the American actress who had stood on the Cobb in the movie.

"It looks just the same!" Tom Oscott said, also smiling at the stone pier. The Golatelys and the Frekes were also staring.

There was no glamour like the glamour of a movie, and this fairly tedious and pretentious romance set in Lyme Regis had succeeded where Persuasion had failed, and that year Lyme Regis was associated with an American actress named Meryl Streep rather than with Jane Austen.

The town itself was a sort of Regency bottleneck, a continuous line of traffic squeezed between tea shops and coaching inns. The town was one of the many on the British coast that, delicately made and appearing to defy gravity, seemed magnetized to its steep cliffs. I spent my time there walking along the Undercliff, a strange landscape feature caused by a great landslip in 1839—twenty acres subsided and a seaside ravine opened, known as the Chasm. It was full of flowers and fossils, and it was protected, a little wooded preserve, between the cliffs and the sea. After a day of scrambling along the slippery Undercliff, I found a house on the way to Yawl with a VACANCIES sign in the window.

This was the Skeats'. "We do bed and breakfast," Margaret Skeat said.

Vesta Skeat was thirteen and sneaked lipstick when her mother was not looking. She had a loud laugh and marble-white skin and a T-shirt that said Adam and the Ants.

"Is that all the clobber you have?" she said, standing in the doorway of my room as I unslung my knapsack. Other guests had had sleeping bags, some had tents, one had about five pairs of shoes. Vesta picked her elbow and told me she hated school.

"You're the bed-and-breakfast man," Vesta Skeat then said.

"That's me," I said.

Vesta widened her eyes and said, "Madness!"

Her mother screamed her name. Vesta said softly, "Shut up, you silly cow," and then winked at me and went obediently downstairs.

I locked the door. Bed-and-breakfast man? Madness? She was referring to a pop song about a tramp who traveled from house to house, sleeping on sofas, and it was sung by the group who called themselves Madness.

The next day I took a country bus to Axminster. It was not far, but I had a train to catch. A man getting off the bus offered his newspaper to the driver. It was the Sun, with a Falklands headline: THIS IS IT!—suggesting that an invasion of the islands by the British was imminent and that it would soon result in a recapture of the territory.

The bus driver said, "That's a Tory paper."

"I'm through with it," Mr. Lurley said.

Dan, the bus driver, said, "I don't want it."

"Why not?" Mr. Lurley said.

"Tory paper!"

"They're all the same," Mr. Lurley said, and left it on the little shelf under the windshield with Dan's lunch bag (two cheese and chutney sandwiches, a small over-ripe tomato, and a Club Biscuit).

Dan picked up the newspaper and threw it out the bus door.

"They're not the bloody same," he said. "That's a Tory paper."

This was up the road from Yawl on the way to Axminster, in the middle of the English countryside, the Conservative passenger, and the socialist behind the wheel.

We traveled through the softly sloping meadows of Devon. A sign on every seat in the bus said, LOWER YOUR HEAD WHEN LEAVING YOUR SEAT, because there was a danger of banging your head on the luggage rack.

To get to what was formerly the Great Western Railway, I bought a ticket at Axminster. This line had once been the London and South-Western Railway. All these railways had been trimmed and made smaller and cheaper. I rode to Exeter ("The town was stormed by the Danes in 876 ... It was wantonly attacked from the air in 1942, when 40 acres, including many ancient buildings, were destroyed") and then changed to a train for Dawlish, on the line once known as the Great Way Round.

This track was laid by the engineering genius Isambard Kingdom Brunei on the very edge of the English coast. He had had to build stone embankments and tunnels—he had reshaped the coast. The line was a combination of slow curves and high-speed straights, surf on one side, cliffs on the other, five miles of excitement. And even along the River Exe it was an experience—the racing train and the river's tide slipping down, thunder and water, and then the bright light of the ocean bathing the train between tunnels.

Dawlish looked wonderful as the train drew in, with the rain falling softly on the station platform on the sea. The platform was like a pier. But when I got out and the train drew away, I saw that Dawlish was small and dull. I asked a man about the hotels here and he said, "I don't know as much as I should about Dawlish," which was precisely what a man had said to me about Dungeness.

I walked down the wet road to Holcombe to Took at the standing rocks at Holcombe Head called the Parson and Clerk, another set of dragon's teeth like Old Harry and His Wife and the Needles. I ambled along the seawall toward Teignmouth, and every so often a train would shoot past me and wet me and nearly blow me into the ocean. I thought that the train on the rocky shore, rolling through a storm, was one of the most beautiful sights in the world. I came to Teignmouth.

"You're alone?" Mrs. Starling said at the Victory Guest House, glancing at my knapsack, my leather jacket, my oily shoes.

"So far," I said.

"I'll show you to your room," she said, a little rattled by my reply.

I was often warmed by a small thrill in following the younger landladies up four flights to the tiny room at the top of the house. We would enter, breathless from the climb, and stand next to the bed somewhat flustered, until she remembered to ask for the £5 in advance—but even that was ambiguous and erotic.

Most of them said You're alone? or Just a single, then? I never explained why. I said I was in publishing. I said I had a week off. I said I liked to walk. I did not say that I had no choice but to travel alone, because I was taking notes and stopping everywhere to write them. I could think clearly only when I was alone, and then my imagination began to work as my mind wandered. They might have asked: How can you bear your own company? I would have had to reply: Because I talk to myself—talking to myself has always been part of my writing and, by the way, I've just been walking along the seawall from Dawlish in the rain muttering, "Wombwell...warm-well ... nutwell ... cathole..."

In quiet Teignmouth ("Keats stayed here in 1818, correcting the proofs of 'Endymion'"), under the red cliffs, old people were bowling in the rain at the green on the seafront, though the Promenade was empty and the pier was closed. At the Riviera Cinema, a turn-of-the-century theater, there were posters for the Teignmouth Operatic Society's production of The Pajama Game. I wandered around the town and, finding nothing better, returned and bought a ticket.

The theater was less than a third full, mostly old people talking too loud and humming to the music. In the course of the production, one of the actors accidentally sat on a telephone, and another almost brained himself by backing against a steel post, and a large piece of scenery fell over during the solemn scene that followed the company picnic. There were fluffed lines and sour notes, and the American accents were either Irish and adenoidal or else frank West Country burrs, the local accent. In a dance number one elderly hoofer fell down with a thud that startled some of the audience from their sleep.

But these were minor matters. The play was done with gusto, and the audience enjoyed it—they found it funny, they laughed, and they were moved by the romantic parts. It was a comedy about a union. In Britain they needed a comedy about a union. The cast was numerous and, judging from the program notes, they were all amateurs—clerks, shop assistants, accountants, teachers. The interpretation was shaky, but there was a clear understanding of American culture among the players—far greater than any equivalent group would have shown in the United States.

Plays in England were seen to be a suitable outlet for the emotions. The English liked dressing up; they liked the clubby community of amateur dramatics; they enjoyed the pressure and teamwork of play production. For the duration of the play they were released from their lives and their work; they could shout and sing, they could express misery or joy; there was no such thing as a class system. They were free. So it struck me that even The Pajama Game in Teignmouth fulfilled the oldest reason for having a play: it was cathartic, and afterward everyone, players and spectators alike, felt much better.

Back at the guest house Mrs. Starling introduced me to George Windus, who had sidewhiskers and baggy pants and a florid face. I suspected that Mrs. Starling hoped that Mr. Windus would ask the questions she was too timid to risk.

"What brings you to Teignmouth then?" Mr. Windus said. His nose was swollen, the color of the Burgundy he was drinking.

I was in publishing, I said. I had a week off. I was traveling along the coast.

"What do you think?" Mr. Windus said, and pinched his whiskers.

"Folkestone's nice," I said.

"Folkestone!" he roared, and Mrs. Starling blinked.

Now he spoke to Mrs. Starling, whose hands were clasped at her throat. Her mouth was small and uncertain, and her dark eyes watchful. Her hair was rumpled—ringlets in disarray—and very attractive.

Mr. Windus was still shouting. "Twenty-five years ago I was in Folkestone! I wasn't above twenty-seven years old. I was there with my wife, staying on the top floor of a hotel—five flights up. On the day we left, I parked my Land-Rover at the front door to make it easy for us to pack up. We were loading and then out of nowhere came a furious little woman! She said to me, 'Parking that horrible motor out there at the entrance—you're lowering the tone of this hotel! Oh, you're lowering the tone!'"

This made Mrs. Starling twitch.

Mr. Windus turned to me and said, "No, Folkestone is not nice!"

***

It was raining hard the next day—too wet for walking. I was no adventurer—so I bought a one-way ticket on the fast train to Plymouth. Once, this was called the Cornish Riviera Express, on the Great Western Railway; now it was the Inter-City 125 on British Rail. I sat in second class and looked at Devon. Most of the passengers were old people, starting vacations. They talked very loud. I sometimes had the impression that the whole of southern England was full of deaf people talking much too loud.

The rain came down. We went along the north bank of the muddy Teign to Newton Abbot, which looked very ugly in the storm. We set off again at a good clip.

"There's none of that old-time noise," Mr. Purewell said. "No whistles and bells and that. It can play tricks on you! You're saying goodbye to someone, and the train just pulls out and surprises you. There's no warning! But I've got a great appreciation for these One-Two-Fives and"—he paused; we went a mile; he resumed—"I used to be a bit puzzled why they were called that. I asked a few people. And then I was told it was their maximum speed."

We were in the tame and gentle hills of Devon, near Totnes ("It consists mainly of one long congested street with many old houses with interesting interiors..."). Here the rain made the landscape mild, and sheep grazed near flowering hedgerows, and from the railway tracks to the horizon there were ten shades of green.

"I gave up smoking," Mr. Gussage said. "The queer thing was it had never entered my head to do it! But it was budget time, you see. I went into my tobacconist for my usual tin and he said, 'We've been sold out for a fortnight.' Then I thought of giving up. I'd nothing to smoke—they were out of Three Nuns. And I managed. Now if anyone smokes in my house, I open the windows. It don't half make a house dirty—smoke. Sometimes, with people smoking, I can hardly see across the room."

Lloyd Gifford was Mr. Gussage's friend. They were bound for Plymouth and a guest house near the Hoe. They were in their seventies and carrying on a shouted conversation.

Mr. Gifford said, "My father smoked! He loved his pipe, my father. I remember what he smoked. It was called Ogden's. The tin was orange. There was a picture of an Indian on it. On his birthday, or at Christmas, we always gave him a tin of Ogden's. He loved his pipe."

Mr. Gifford, telling the story, had made himself sad. But Mr. Gussage had heard "Christmas" and was off.

"I've finished with all present-giving!" he shouted. "And I don't want to get any. I said to myself, 'I've decided now that I've moved permanently I don't want to get any presents.' I wrote everyone a letter saying, 'Please don't send me any gifts—just send me a suitable card.'"

Mr. Gifford was still damp-eyed with the memory of his father, the pipe, the tins of Ogden's. He said nothing to his companion.

"And do you know?" Mr. Gussage said. "They were relieved!"

Side by side on another seat were Mr. Bleaberry and Mr. Crake. They were also old; they were also shouting.

"First thing I do after we get settled in," Mr. Bleaberry said, "and if it's not raining, we'll go to the station and get timetables. I like to be up to date with my timetables."

This set Mr. Crake thinking. At last he said, "We used to go everywhere, my wife and I." There was a silence. "And that probably added fire to the fuel."

Dartmoor was on the right—the high rounded hill called Ugborough Beacon standing near other sudden bulges. In the meadows on the left side of the track lambs were fleeing from the train.

Raymond Greasely had been talking ever since the train had pulled out of Newton Abbot. Now he was saying, "...and my daughter is the pastoral assistant. There's a pastor, so she's the pastoral assistant. When she gets through with her studies she'll be a reverend. And she's still doing her journalism. How she does it all, I don't know. There's an abbey near her and the combined churches got together. I don't know about the Catholics. I think they stayed out. They always do, don't they? They call it a sin if they join up with anyone else. There was one big service at the abbey, everyone except the Catholics. My daughter's job, as pastoral assistant, was to read the lessons, two lessons. I'll bet she got a thrill out of that..."

A small old hunched-over man named Cox had sat in a rear seat and said nothing. He was looking out the window. What was it about train windows that made people remember? Train windows seemed to mirror the past. Mr. Cox stared and saw his face. After a time, even this very silent man spoke up.

"It's funny," he said, seeming to waken. "I've never shouted before or since, but I said to him, 'Stop picking on me—find someone else to pick on! I won't take any more of this from you!' It just came out. I was mad. He was a bully. Some people are never happier than when they're picking on someone. After that, when he came to check on my fire extinguisher"—what was that?—"he was very nice to me, we always had a chat."

This memory seemed to embarrass the others, but Mr. Cox was happy and even seemed to be savoring it.

"I think it's a detestable thing, picking on someone," he said. "I tried to bottle it up, but it made me bad-tempered. Then I shouted at him. It was the only time in my life. It just came out."

After the villages of Devon, Plymouth looked vast. It was scattered over several valleys, and farther in, it was on the hills as well. It was only the larger towns and cities of England that covered hills like this. The Plymouth outskirts looked ugly and dull.

"Busy, built-up place," Mr. Gussage said. "I remember my mother and father came to my wedding. They were country people, and this was Brighton. They said, 'Look at all them slate roofs!'"

Mr. Gifford was staring at Plymouth. He said, "Yes. Look at all them slate roofs."

7. The Cornish Explorer

A SPECIAL TRAIN TICKET I bought in Plymouth called the Cornish Explorer allowed me to go anywhere in Cornwall, on any train. I traveled into the low shaggy hills, which were full of tumbling walls and rough stone houses and yellow explosions of gorse bushes. I had lunch for £8 ($14), which was twice as much as my ticket. The dining car was set for eighteen people, but I was the only diner. Elsewhere on the train, the English sat eating their sandwiches out of bags, munching apples, and salting hard-boiled eggs. Times were hard. I realized that my lunch was overpriced, yet in a very short time there would be no more four-course lunches on these trains, no more rattling silverware, and no waiter ladling soup. But it was also ridiculous for me to be the only person eating: soup, salad, roast chicken and bread sauce, apple crumble, cheese and biscuits, coffee. There were two waiters in the dining car, and a cook and his assistant in the kitchen. The meal that most long-distance railway passengers had once taken for granted had now become a luxury, and Major Uprichard would soon be telling his grandchildren, "I can remember when there were waiters on trains—yes, waiters!"

There were rolling hills until Redruth, and then the land was bleak and bumpy. There was only one working tin mine left in Cornwall (near St. Just), but the landscape was scattered with abandoned mineworks, which looked like ruined churches in ghost villages. Cornwall was peculiarly uneven, with trees growing sideways out of stony ground, and many solitary cottages. On a wet day, its granite was lighted by a granite-colored sky, and the red roads gleamed in a lurid way; it looked to be the most haunted place in England, and then its reputation for goblins seemed justified. It was also one of those English places which constantly reminded the alien, with visual shocks like vast battered cliffs and china-clay waste dumps and the evidence of desertion and ruin, that he was far from home. It looked in many places as if the wind had screamed it of all its trees.

"I love the red earth," Mrs. Mumby said, staring out the train window at the drizzle and reminiscing. "During the war I lived at Ross-on-Wye, in an antiquated old cottage. These Cornish cottages remind me of that. I don't like the architecture of today. Concrete jungle, I call it."

Appearing to reply to this, Vivian Greenup said sharply, "I've looked everywhere for my husband's walking stick. My daughter brought it to the hospital in case he might need it. After he died, I looked everywhere and couldn't find it."

Mrs. Mumby stared at Mrs. Greenup, and her expression seemed to say: Why is Vivian running on like this about her dead husband's walking stick?

"It's quite a weapon," Mrs. Greenup said. "You could use it as a weapon."

We came to Penzance ("somewhat ambitiously styled the 'Cornish Riviera'...John Davison, the Scottish poet, drowned himself here"). I changed trains and went back up the line about seven miles to St. Erth, and there I waited in the rain for the next train to St. Ives.

There were few pleasures in England that could beat the small three-coach branch-line train, like this one from St. Erth to St. Ives. And there was never any question that I was on a branch-line train, for it was only on these trains that the windows were brushed by the branches of the trees that grew close to the tracks. Branch-line trains usually went through the woods. It was possible to tell from the sounds at the windows—the branches pushed the glass like mops and brooms—what kind of a train it was. You knew a branch line with your eyes shut.

We went along the River Hayle and paused at the station called Leland Saltings, which faced green-speckled mudflats. Hayle was across the water, with a mist lying over it. There were two more stops—it was a short line—and then the semicircle of St. Ives. It was Cornish, unadorned, a gray, huddled, storm-lit town on several hills and a headland, with a beach in its sheltered harbor. Today, in the rain, it was quiet, except for the five species of gulls that were as numerous now as when W. H. Hudson was here and wrote about them.

All the great coastal towns of England were a mixture of the sublime and the ridiculous. Here was the sublime climate and the pearly light favored by watercolorists, the sublime bay of St. Ives and the sublime lighthouse that inspired Virginia Woolf to write one of her greatest novels, and the sublime charm of the twisty streets and stone cottages. And there was the ridiculous: the postcards with kittens in the foreground of harbor scenes, the candy shops with authentic local fudge, the bumper stickers, the sweatshirts with slogans printed on them, the souvenir pens and bookmarks and dishtowels, and the shops full of bogus handicrafts, carved crosses and pendants. These carvings at St. Ives advertised "Our Celtic Heritage—The Celts were famous for their courage and fighting qualities, which carried them before the birth of Christ from their homeland north of the Alps, across the known world ..." Cornish pride was extraordinary, and it was more than pride. It had fueled a nationalist movement, and though the last Cornish-speaking person died in 1777 (it was Dolly Pentreath of Mousehole), and Cornish culture today was little more than ghost stories and meat pies, there was a fairly vigorous campaign being fought for Cornwall to secede from England altogether. It was not for a vague alien like myself to say this was ridiculous, but it did seem to me very strange.

Across St. Ives Bay were sandy cliffs and dunes, and I thought of walking along that shore to the village of Portreath: it was about twelve miles; I could do it before nightfall. But the rain was coming darkly down like a shower of smut, and I still had my Cornish Explorer ticket. So I walked to St. Ives Head, where the Atlantic was riotous; then I returned to the station to wait for the little train to take me back to St. Erth.

The graffiti at St. Ives Station said, Wogs ought to be hit about the head with the utmost severity, and under this, Niggers run amok in London — St. Ives next! and in a different hand, Racism is a social disease—you should see a doctor.

I went back to St. Erth and changed for the main-line train to Liskeard, going back the way I had come, past the mining chimneys and the clay deposits and the great hard sweeps of stony land and the green glades that each contained a large house—one comfortable family—but no more.

The branch-line train to Looe was waiting at Liskeard. It ran on a single track through a narrow ravine under the main-line viaduct and made a big loop through the countryside, past ivy-covered walls and steep hills to Coombe Junction, where a man in a rubber raincoat yanked levers to change the points, nudging the train down the branch line to Looe and the coast. There were about twenty-five people on the three coaches of this train, and the train went so slowly, it did not even startle the horses cropping grass by the side of the track.

The woods on this rainy day were deep green. The branches bumped and brushed the windows. The nearness of the trees and the slowness of the trains were the best things about the branch lines.

We came to St. Keyne. There was a famous well here. "The reported virtue of the water is this, that, whether husband or wife come first to drink thereof, they get the mastery thereby." There is a ballad by Southey in which a man describes how, just after his wedding, he went to the "gifted Well" and had a drink, so that he would be "Master for life," but his wife was quicker-witted.

I hastened, as soon as the wedding was done,

And left my Wife in the porch;

But i' faith she had been wiser than me,

For she took a bottle to church.

Even so slight a poem as this seemed to give the acre of woods at St. Keyne a curious importance. This was true all over England, which was why England was so hard to describe: much of it had been written about by great men, and the very mention of a place in a literary work tended to distort the place, for literature had the capacity to turn the plainest corner of England into a shrine.

We came to Sandplace and then Causeland. The Looe River was hardly a river here—you could jump across it at Causeland—but then it widened from a creek into something more substantial, a waterway containing tussocky islands. On one of them there was a swan sleeping in a nest, looking like the fragments of a failed wedding cake, and the rocks of the shore looked nastily like dead ferrets. At the confluence of the West Looe and East Looe rivers we passed the steep narrow harbor of Looe, another apparently magnetized village, and a sign saying, "Headquarters of the Shark Angling Club of Great Britain."

It was still light, and I was stiff from my shuttling back and forth with my Cornish Explorer ticket. And the rain had finally stopped. So I oiled my hiking shoes and as night fell I walked along the coastal cliffs, past Hendersick and through the buttercups at the Warren above Talland Bay to Polperro. Just below Crumplehorn—I muttered the names to myself as I went—I found a pleasant-looking pub and got a room for the night. Everything seemed very simple and there was always enough daylight to do anything I pleased.

Polperro was a village of whitewashed cottages tumbled together in a rocky ravine on the sea. The streets were as narrow as alleys, and few of them could take motor vehicles. I saw a full-sized bus try to make it down one street—hopeless. At best, one small car could inch down a street, knocking the petals off geraniums in the window boxes at either side. When two cars met head-on there was usually an argument over who was to reverse to let the other pass.

The loathing for tourists and outsiders in Cornwall was undisguised—I had a feeling that it was the tourists who had made the Cornish nationalistic, for no one adopted a funny native costume quicker or talked more intimidatingly of local tradition than the local person under siege by tourists. Polperro was a pretty funnel but with the narrowest neck, so there was nowhere to go but the tiny harbor. It was true that the Cornish derived most of their income from tourists, but there was no contradiction in the way they both welcomed and disliked us at the same time. Natives always had very sound reasons for disliking outsiders; the Cornish fishermen had nothing whatever to do with tourists, but the other Cornish were farming people and treated tourists like livestock—feeding them, fencing them in, and getting them to move to new pastures. We were cumbersome burdens, a great headache most of the time, but at the end of the day there was some profit in us.

Mr. Tregeagle, the hotel-keeper I met in Polperro, had been a farmer for thirty years. He had dairy cattle, between sixty and seventy head, and he also grew vegetables. The month before I arrived in the village he had chucked his farm in Bodmin. He had bought this little hotel in the hope of making a living, but he laughed when he admitted that he had never run a hotel before and knew practically nothing about it.

"But I was losing thousands on my milk," Mr. Tregeagle said. "I owed money to the bank. The price of feed increased and the price of milk dropped. Last year it was terrible. I was in debt and I was working eighteen hours a day. I said to myself, 'What's the point?' I began selling my cows. I hated doing it, but I had no choice."

"What about your vegetables?" I said. "You could feed yourself, couldn't you?"

"The vegetables were useless. I had a garden full of lovely lettuces. One morning I brought three crates—about a hundred lettuces—down to the local greengrocer. He offered me a penny apiece for them. A bloody quid for three crates!"

"Did you sell them?"

"I took them home and buried them, and I plowed the rest of them under. And then I said, 'That's it—I'm selling.' The Tregeagles have been farming here for generations, but we'll never go back to the land again."

There was a South African couple at the hotel, Tony and Norah Swart. He was a fat and rather silent red-faced man in his mid-forties, and she was harder and younger, talkative and unsmiling, a girl with a grudge. Tony's silence was a kind of apology, for Norah was usually complaining, and she had that hypersensitivity which some South Africans have, the bristling suspicion that at any moment she is going to be accused of being a bumpkin, and the justified fear that she is a bumpkin—proud of and at the same time hating her snarling accent and bad manners.

It had been a horrible trip from Capetown. They had wanted to stop in Nigeria and Zaire, but those African countries would not let them enter. Norah Swart said, "It's bloddy unfair."

I said this was probably because Africans were discriminated against in South Africa. They treated Africans like dogs, so African countries were disinclined to put out the red carpet for South Africans.

"The real trouble," Mrs. Swart said, "is that we were too nice to them. When the Australians were shooting their Abos and you were killing your Indians, we were looking after our blacks."

"Of course," I said. "You're famous for looking after your blacks."

"Kristy, my Australian friend, said to me, 'If you'd shot yours like we did ours, you wouldn't have these problems today.'"

I said, "What a pity you didn't exterminate them."

"That's what I say," Mrs. Swart said. The thought of mass murder softened her features and for the first time she looked almost pretty.

But her husband saw I was being sarcastic. He kept his gaze on me and went very quiet.

They especially hated the Africans in Namibia. They called it "South-West"; they said it belonged to them, they wanted to raise caracols there, and Norah Swart made a noise at me when I asked her what a caracol was. They said they would never willingly turn it over to African rule, but when I said that African rule was inevitable in Namibia ("Stop calling it Namibia," she said), the Swarts said they would fight for it. It was an empty land, Tony Swart said—only 400,000 people in it. He swore this figure was correct, but later I checked and found the population to be almost two million, of whom 75,000 were white.

I asked them where they had traveled in England.

"Lyme Regis," Mrs. Swart said. "Where they made that movie."

"We're just motoring down the coast."

"What was the name of that movie, Tone?"

Tony shook his head. He did not know.

Mrs. Swart said, "People around here keep telling us to read Daphne Du Maurier. Have you read it?"

She thought Daphne Du Maurier was the name of a novel. Instead of setting her straight, I said that it was a very good novel indeed and that the author, Rebecca something, had written many others. I urged her to ask for Daphne at the local bookshop.

Polperro was in such a deep ravine that the sun did not strike it in the morning. I walked through the damp dark village—straight overhead the sky was blue—and climbed out of the little harbor onto the cliffs just as a bright mist descended. It hung lightly over the rocky shore and the purple sea, and created luminous effects of live creatures appearing and disappearing near the tumbledown cliff was green, from the top to the sea, full of ivy and meadow grass and the foam sliding patchily back from the rocks. Bright and indistinct with shadowy light, and softened by mist, the whole coast that morning was like a Turner watercolor, or more than one, because it kept dripping and changing, the greens and blues becoming sharper as the morning wore on.

I was setting out to have lunch at Fowey, and I planned to walk on to Par, where there was a railway junction. The grass on this path was wet with mist and dew, and before I had gone half a mile my shoes were soaked, in spite of the oil I had put on them in Looe.

This was the softer side of Cornwall, damper and greener than the north coast, which was pounded by the Atlantic. The whole cliff was green, from the top to the sea, full of ivy and meadow grass and brambles. The cliffs of Cornwall were depicted always as rocky, like ruined castles and castle walls. "I like Cornwall very much. It is not England," D. H. Lawrence wrote. "It is bare and dark and elemental ... bare and sad under a level sky." He meant the other coast, the Cornish stereotype of black headlands on a choppy sea, and charming desolation. But here on the path to Fowey the cliffs were like steep meadows. The bramble bushes and the gorse made a mild reflection in the water; the trailing ivy gave a delicacy to the sea; and the foliage muffled the wind. The air was sweetened by all this greenery, and the fragrance of the rain was emphasized by its soft stutter on the grass. There was nothing elemental here, thank God.

Two battered old ladies appeared on the path, tramping toward me out of the gorse—Miss Brace and Miss Badcock. They were half-naked, leathery, and terrifying in halters and faded shorts, and though it was cool on these cliffs, they were perspiring. Old ladies in skimpy clothes could look defenseless. These two looked formidable—rather plump and plain and dauntless, with lined faces, and varicose veins standing out on their calves like thongs. They were very brown. They carried walking sticks with spiked tips. One had a bright patch on her shorts saying Bad-Gastein. They were Ramblers, they said, and then, as if to prove it, said they had walked here from Land's End.

"And we 'aven't tooched pooblic transport," Miss Brace said. Her rucksack must have weighed a hundred pounds. She had the tent; Miss Badcock had the cooking gear—you could hear the clink of the skillet.

Miss Badcock said, "'ow mooch does your knapsack weigh?"

Northerners. I said, "Not much." They plumped it with their hands and weighed it and laughed, taking me for a twinkie.

"We've got spare shoes," Miss Badcock said.

"Let's go, Vera," Miss Brace said. And she explained to me. "We're in a hoora to find accommodation in Polperro."

I said, "Polperro is full of hotels."

"We want a youth hostel," Miss Brace said.

A youth hostel? They were each well over sixty—Miss Badcock looked closer to seventy. I could see Miss Badcock's navel.

They had walked a hundred and fifteen miles since last Thursday. Had they seen anything interesting?

Miss Brace said, "We 'ad soom nice coves and bays. We 'ad soom nice villages. We joost walk by."

Miss Badcock said, "We don't stop mooch."

They asked me where I was going. I said, "To Fowey and then to Par today."

Miss Brace said, "It's a canny little step."

A canny little step was similar to a fair old trot. Why didn't the English ever use the word "far"?

We went our separate ways, and now it began to rain. Miss Brace had said that was the reason they were so scantily dressed—because of the rain: fewer clothes to get wet, and they dried quicker. I had been ashamed to say that I had a hooded plastic raincoat. I now put it on and walked around Lantivet Bay and on to Lantic Bay, where the water was wonderfully marbled with sea foam, the white veiny effect heightened by the luminous blue-green water, which was flat and gleaming.

Toward lunchtime I walked around Blackbottle Rock and into the village of Polruan. This village was so tiny, and its roads so narrow, a sign to the entrance of the village said: "Vehicular Access to Village Prohibited for Day Visitors 10am-6pm."

It was strange, the way some of these villages were protected. Polruan was sealed off: no traffic. But people still lived there, taking refuge in their small houses and the distant past. And visitors parked up the road and wandered around, peering through cottage windows and remarking on the cobblestones.

There was a ferry from Polruan to Fowey, across Fowey Harbour. The ferry sign said:

Adults 25p

Children 25p

Dogs 12p

Pram 12p

Cycle 25p

All these villages looked better from the water, face-on like Fowey from its ferry, with all their watching windows and all the peeling paint and storm damage. Fowey was perpendicular, built around the rock shelves of the steep harbor, and the houses were faded and stately. At the head of the harbor was a green wedge of woods and the emptying Fowey River, and at the harbor mouth high battlements in ruins. Fowey had been a harbor from ancient times. It looked an excellent place to start a long voyage, because it was a beautiful settled place, like a serene lakeside village.

I had my lunch—a sandwich—on the cliff at the west side of the harbor and, startling the wrens in the hedges, set off again. I walked at the margins of pastures, on the cliff edges above the sea, and around coves to a headland called the Gribbin, where there was a candy-striped beacon—a marker for sailors. From this height I could see St. Austell, and Par sprinkled at the head of St. Austell Bay, and twenty miles of coast—mountainous heaps of china-clay refuse, and Black Head, and the whole of dark blue Mevagissey Bay as far as Dodman Point. The distant rocks in the sea were called the Gwinges.

One of the pleasures of traveling that fractured coast was a vista like this. The irregularity of the English coast offered unusually long views, and these heights helped. A vantage point like the Gribbin made this part of Cornwall look like a topographical map with raised features in bright colors—the best views were always like dazzling maps. And in contrast to the sea, there were the reassuring pastures: on one side the cows and bees and sheep and slate walls and the smell of manure, and on the other side the gulls and cormorants and the whiff of salt spray—and these were mingled. The gulls crossed into the pastures, the crows strutted on the sand, and the smells of muck and salt were mingled, too.

I walked on. Under the trees above Polkerris, which was a small harbor and beach, there was a cool shade and a rich aroma—a whole acre of wild garlic.

Par was small and ugly—a china-clay factory wrapped around half its bay, and the other half a clutter of caravans and broken-down shallys. Rising behind this miserable beach were long terraces of hollow-eyed houses. Factory effluent had stained the water. I had been heading for Par all day, but instead of stopping I walked through the town to the station and caught the train that crossed the narrow part of Cornwall.

This branch-line train from Par to Newquay was a delight. We were heading west, and the bright sun was propped just above the horizon. I took the seat behind the driver, in the first carriage, and slipped my wet shoes off. There was nothing in the world more restful than an English branch-line train—it seemed like the highest stage of civilization. Nothing was disturbed by it, or spoiled; it did not alter the landscape; it was the machine in the garden, but it was a gentle machine. It was fast and economical and as safe as a vehicle could possibly be.

Mr. Kemp, the conductor, said, "When I took over this train they said they were going to close the line. That was eighteen years ago! They're still saying it, but they haven't done it yet."

But of course they would eventually, because they had closed down a hundred others just like it, all over the country. I suggested this to Mr. Kemp.

He said, "I'll be retired by then. But it'll be a shame if they close it. It's a beautiful line!"

We went through a green corridor of sunlit trees and sparkling leaves to Luxulyan. And then the landscape became stony and rather bruised-looking, as the interior of Cornwall often appeared. The hills of rubbish from the china-clay factories looked like pyramids—thick, broadbottomed, and sprawling across treeless plateaus—so that the effect was that of a lost city, as empty and geometric as any Aztec ruin. This was not far from the tiny village of Bugle.

The scars and eruptions—I supposed they were mines—showed clearly on the long low hills falling away from Roche. I heard someone referring to "barrows," but didn't know whether he meant the china-clay pyramids or the ancient burial mounds in the distance. The train passed under a number of small stone bridges. They were old and solid and symmetrical and looked both Chinese and ecclesiastical to me, but as I was thinking this a man behind me named R. L. Justice began explaining to his friend Maurice that this was Victorian railway architecture. It still looked Chinese and ecclesiastical.

Most of the people on this train—about sixty of them—were on what they called a "whist holiday," having traveled most of the day from Wolverhampton. I asked what a whist holiday was. It was three days of whist in a hotel at Newquay—just cards, in the lounge, while the Atlantic smashed against the coast. It was quite nice, really, they said. It made a change. They did it every year, taking advantage of the low-season prices. They were old and rather sweet and softly talkative.

Then there came a loud, deaf-lady's voice. It was one of the widows, Mrs. Buttress. "You see, they're Indian extracts!" she said. "Yes, extracts! From Africa! But they're very refined! And as far as their English is concerned, they could be dark-colored English people. They come from a very well-to-do family. And they're so polite! They are very kind to me, always bringing me things—the loveliest shawl! Sometimes it's food. Well, the food is interesting but you wouldn't want to make a whole meal of it, would you? I never comment on the food, but their fabrics are really quite fine. Now their child is car-mad! Their first names are impossible, but their surname is easy. It's Baden. An Indian name. But it's easy to remember, because it's like Baden-Powell!"

The train swung around the back of Newquay, which was so thickly piled against the coast, it had displaced the cliffs with three miles of hotels and boardinghouses.

***

About a half-hour after arriving in Newquay I was sitting in a parlor, a dog chewing my shoe, and having a cup of tea with Florence Puttock ("I said leave that shoe alone!"), who was telling me about the operation on her knee. It was my mention of walking that brought up the subject of feet, legs, knees, and her operation. And the television was on—there was a kind of disrespect these days in not turning it on for Falklands news. And Queenie, the other Peke, had a tummy upset. And Mrs. Puttock's cousin Bill hadn't rung all day—he usually rang just after lunch. And Donald Puttock, who lisped and was sixty-one—he had taken early retirement because of his back—Donald was watching the moving arrows on the Falklands map and listening to Florence talking about ligaments, and he said, "I spent me 'ole life in 'ornchurch."

Somehow, I was home.

But it was not my home. I had burrowed easily into this cozy privacy, and I could leave any time I wished. I had made the choice, for the alternatives in most seaside towns were a hotel, or a guest house, or a bed-and-breakfast place. This last alternative always tempted me, but I had to feel strong to do it right. A bed-and-breakfast place was a bungalow, usually on a suburban street some distance from the Front and the Promenade and the hotels. It was impossible to enter such a house and not feel you were interrupting a domestic routine—something about Florence's sewing and Donald's absurd slippers. The house always smelled of cooking and disinfectant, but most of all it smelled of in-laws.

It was like every other bungalow on the street, except for one thing. This one had a sign in the window, saying vacancies. I had the impression that this was the only expense in starting such an establishment. You went over to Maynards and bought a vacancies sign, and then it was simply a matter of airing out the spare bedroom. Soon, an odd man would show up—knapsack, leather jacket, oily hiker's shoes—and spend an evening listening to the householders' stories of the high cost of living, or the greatness of Bing Crosby, or a particularly painful operation. The English, the most obsessively secretive people in their day-to-day living, would admit you to the privacy of their homes, and sometimes even unburden themselves, for just £5. "I've got an awful lot on my plate at the moment," Mrs. Spackle would say. ("There's Bert's teeth, the Hoover's packed up, and my Enid thinks she's in a family way..." When it was late, and everyone else in bed, the woman you knew as Mrs. Garlick would pour you a schooner of cream sherry, say "Call me Ida," and begin to tell you about her amazing birthmark.

Bed and breakfast was always vaguely amateur, the woman of the house saying she did it because she liked to cook, and could use a little extra cash ("money for jam"), and she liked company, and their children were all grown up, and the house was rather empty and echoey. The whole enterprise of bed and breakfast was carried on by the woman, but done with a will, because she was actually getting paid for doing her normal household chores. No special arrangements were required. At its best it was like a perfect marriage; at its worst it was like a night with terrible in-laws. Usually I was treated with a mixture of shyness and suspicion; but that was traditional English hospitality—wary curiosity and frugal kindness.

The English required guests to be uncomplaining, and most of the lower-middle-class people who ran bed-and-breakfast places were intolerant of a guest's moaning, and they thought—with some justification—that they had in their lives suffered more than that guest. "During the war," they always began, and I knew I was about to lose the argument in the face of some evidence of terrible hardship. During the war, Donald Puttock was buzz-bombed by the Germans as he crouched under his small staircase in Hornchurch, and, as he often said, he was lucky to be alive.

I told him I was traveling around the coast.

"Just what we did!" Mr. Puttock said. He and Florence had driven from Kent to Cornwall in search of a good place to live. They had stopped in all the likely places. Newquay was the best. They would stay here until they died. If they moved at all (Florence wanted fewer bedrooms), it would be down the road.

"Course, the local people 'ere 'ate us," Mr. Puttock said, cheerfully.

"Donald got his nose bitten off the other day by a Cornishman," Mrs. Puttock said. "Still hasn't got over it."

"I don't give a monkey's," Mr. Puttock said.

Later, Mrs. Puttock said that she had always wanted to do bed and breakfast. She wasn't like some of them, she said, who made their guests leave the house after breakfast and stay away all day—some of these people you saw in the bus shelter, they weren't waiting for the number fifteen; they were bed-and-breakfast people, killing time. It was bed-and-breakfast etiquette to stay quietly out of the house all day, even if it was raining.

Mrs. Puttock gave me a card she had had printed. It listed the attractions of her house.

• TV Lounge

• Access to rooms at all times

• Interior-sprung mattresses

• Free parking space on premises

• Free shower available

• Separate tables

The lounge was the Puttocks' parlor, the parking space was their driveway, the shower, was a shower, and the tables tables. This described their house, which was identical with every other bungalow in Newquay.

I was grateful for the bed-and-breakfast places. At ten-thirty, after the Falklands news (and now every night there was "Falklands Special"), while we were all a bit dazed by the violence and the speculation and Mr. Puttock was saying "The Falklands look like bloody Bodmin Moor, but I suppose we have to do something," Mrs. Puttock would say to me, "Care for a hot drink?" When she was in the kitchen making Ovaltine, Mr. Puttock and I were talking baloney about the state of the world. I was grateful, because to me this was virgin territory—a whole house open to my prying eyes: books, pictures, postcard messages, souvenirs, and opinions. I especially relished looking at family photographs. "That's us at the Fancy Dress Ball in Romford just after the war ... That's our cat, Monty ... That's me in a bathing costume..." My intentions were honorable but my instincts were nosy, and I went sniffing from bungalow to bungalow to discover how those people lived.

It was either that—the Puttocks in their bungalow—or the opposite—vast bare cliffs of windswept stone that were blasted by the Atlantic. I used to leave the bungalow and laugh out loud at the difference. The town of Newquay in its charmless way was bleaker than the cliffs. It was dreary buildings and no trees. But the visitors were decent folks, mainly old people who were rather overdressed for such an ordinary place. The men wore hats and ties and jackets, and the women dresses and pearls. It looked like churchgoing garb, but they were off to buy the Express or the Telegraph or to walk to the bandstand and back. They seldom strayed out of the town and were never on the cliffs.

In a month or so, Mr. Puttock said, it would all be roaring with yobboes—fat mustached youths and oafish girls, drinking themselves silly and doing damage, or at least leaving a trail of vomit along the Promenade. Mr. Puttock intimated that a population composed of the very old and the very young did not exactly make Newquay sparkle.

Dorothy, a half-Indian, half-English girl I met, said this was true—Newquay was slow, she said. Dorothy had spent the past two years sewing buttons on cardigans in a sweatshop in Leicester, so she certainly knew what slow meant. Otherwise, she was full of surprising answers.

Did she like her job at the Indian restaurant?

She said, "I like the hours—six to midnight."

What was her ambition in life?

"I'd like to own a factory."

How had she prepared herself for factory-owning?

"I've got an O-Level in needlework."

What did she do for fun?

"Martial arts, you know? Tae-Kwon-Do. And I like making joompers."

Most people agreed that Newquay was a hard place in which to make a living. The fish-and-chip shops would not open until June, and then it was a short season—two months or less. "And the real problem with chip shops," Mr. Ramsay told me, "is that you can't tell them apart. I can't tell the difference, and I run one! If they use fresh fish and fresh potatoes, that's another story, but not many of them do." Ramsay was on the dole. "I'll open my shop in about a month."

I was beginning to find the Puttocks a little trying. I had told them I was in publishing, and they pestered me with dull questions about books. They regarded books as clumsy, pointless things, and Donald Puttock smiled in pity whenever he mentioned them. What was the use? he seemed to say. He had no objection to them, but what was the good of them? He was entirely ignorant; he had a few harmless opinions. Mrs. Puttock had her dogs and her jigsaw puzzles. There was nothing more. Sometimes I imagined that they were terribly frightened.

One night after the news—an invasion of the Falklands was predicted—I asked Mr. Puttock what he thought about the war.

He said, "I don't know anything about it," and left the room.

I wondered what his politics were, but when I asked him who his Member of Parliament was, he said he did not know.

"We've been so busy for the past couple of years," Mrs. Puttock explained.

If they had secrets I never learned them, but in a superficial way they had made it possible for me to invade their privacy for a few days.

And then I was overcome with the in-law feeling of wanting to go—of stepping outside and never coming back. That morning I studied the weather forecast, because I would need fairly good weather for my walk along the cliffs to Padstow. The Telegraph said, "Scattered clouds ... occasional showers." Rut there was a large weather item on the front page:

CLOUDS BEGIN TO THIN OUT

Clouds from Wednesday's intense cold front began to thin out over the Falklands yesterday. Overcast low and broken high clouds still covered the islands and adjacent waters, but the heaviest weather was in the east and north.

The deepening low pressure area was centred at the southern tip of South America.

Fairly good weather meant there would be an invasion of the Falklands by British troops. On the other hand, I had no definite idea of what the weather would be like for me on the coastal path to Padstow.

I slipped away from the Puttocks' bungalow, feeling sprung, and I hurried to the path. It was cloudy and slightly rainy, but the visibility was good and the path was firm. I could see the black headlands in the distance, Beryl's Point, after the sweep of Watergate Bay and Park Head and, in the smoky distance, the giant shadow of Trevose Head.

I walked on. There was no greenery here. It had been torn away. There was only a thin meadow on top of the rock cliffs. The coast was high, hard, and gray, and the rocks split and wrinkled, some of them cleaved open. The coves were great jagged hollows of sloosh-ing surf and waves—what noises came out of the caverns under those cliffs! But it was familiar thunder, for this coast was like the coast of Maine.

The paths were steep and narrow, and by the time I walked the five miles to Mawgan Porth I was ready to stop for coffee. There was a detachment of U.S. Marines guarding—what?—probably an atomic bomb on the cliffs here at Mawgan—but I did not meet them. I met the Wheekers, Marian and Bob, who had just rolled out of bed and were having tea, "and I wouldn't mind a bowl of flakes," Marian said. Her sparse hair was coppery with henna, and she sucked smoke out of the cigarette she had pinched in her fingers.

"I'm tired," Mr. Wheeker said carefully, "because I 'ave just woke up. Heh."

He looked at me and grinned to signal that he had intended a joke.

I asked them whether they had heard the news on the radio—that an attack on the Falklands was expected.

"I never listen to the news," Mr. Wheeker said. "Know why?"

No, I said, I didn't know why.

"Because there's nothing you can do about it. Right, my dear?"

Mrs. Wheeker agreed, and then she narrowed her eyes at me and said, "Course, you people 'ave been criticizing us."

I said I had been under the impression that the United States had given material support to the British and, because of it, had alienated the whole of South America. I wanted to tell him about the Monroe Doctrine, but he was at me again.

"We're in this all alone," he said. "And the French are worse than the Americans."

Mrs. Wheeker said, "My father always said, 'I'd rather have the Germans over here than the French.'"

I said, "Do you mean the German army?"

"The German anything," Mrs. Wheeker said. "It's them French I 'ate."

A car drew up to the hotel and a family tumbled out, yelling.

"Too many tourists 'ere, that's the trouble," Mr. Wheeker said. "That's why the Cornish are so unfriendly, like. They can't stick the tourists."

"Course, that's where all their money comes from," Mrs. Wheeker said. "Kick out the tourists and they wouldn't 'ave a penny."

"You're walking, then?" Mr. Wheeker said, his teacup shaking at his mouth.

I said yes, along the cliffs.

"How many miles you reckon on walking, then?" he asked.

I said I averaged between fifteen and twenty a day.

"We never walk," Mr. Wheeker said, and made it sound like self-abuse.

"We 'ave walked," Mrs. Wheeker said.

I said, "It's not much fun in this weather."

"It's been trying to rain all morning," Mrs. Wheeker said.

I smiled. That was one of my favorite expressions.

"We never minded the weather," Mr. Wheeker said. "We walked fifteen or twenty miles— in an evening. In rain, snow, wind, anything—anything except fog. Never in fog. We couldn't stick fog."

"And another thing about the Cornish," Mrs. Wheeker said, suddenly bored by her husband, who was almost certainly lying about all the walking. "The Cornish mispronounciate their words."

This was wonderful. She mispronounced the word mispronounce!

I remembered the Wheekers again later that day, because they were the only people I had met on the path, and when I arrived in Padstow I heard the news that the Falklands had been invaded: a British frigate, the Ardent, had been sunk and twenty-two men drowned, and a bridgehead established at San Carlos, and hundreds of Argentines killed. I especially remembered the Wheekers' bored silly faces and how little they cared.

The River Camel was black that afternoon. Instead of crossing it I went to Wadebridge. I decided to return to the main line and Exeter, and take the branch line to the North Devon coast. I set out the next day, thinking: To be anonymous and traveling in an interesting place is an intoxication.

8. The Branch Line to Barnstaple

AMONG THE QUIET HILLS and meadows in the middle of Devon, this small train of three spruce coaches was the only moving object, and its harmless racket the only sound. It was one hour from end to end of the branch line, Exeter to Barnstaple, much of it along a stream called the River Taw, which the train crossed and recrossed. It was the last rural branch line in the shire.

Because it was a remnant, soon to be swept away, it was greatly favored by railway buffs. Their interest always seemed to me worse than indecent and their joy-riding a mild form of necrophilia. They were on board getting their last looks at the old stations, photographing the fluting and floriation, the pediments and bargeboards and pilasters, the valencing on the wooden awnings, the strapwork, and—in architecture every brick has a different name—the quoins. They knew that when the line was closed, like the four others that had once been joined to it, every beautiful station would be sold to anyone who could raise a mortgage to turn it into a bungalow for a boasting family.

It seemed odd to be inland after so much coast. I missed the drenching light, the sea boiling under the cliffs, the sound of surf on sand, which was like the sound of grieving. Here the landscape was motionless and silent, long low hills and withered villages—some were half-dead, like Copplestone, with its shut-down station and grass knee-deep on the platform. This branch line was old—finished in 1854—and it had always been useful. But it was faintly comic, as all country trains seemed as they jerked across the meadows and made the cows stare. This one was full of Bertie Wooster touches, especially in the names. It went through the Creedy Valley and on to Yeoford, Lapford, Eggesford, and Kings Nympton; Portsmouth Arms Station was actually a public house with a funereal saloon bar, and Umberleigh was probably the setting of Jeeves Lays an Egg. Now we were in the valley of the Taw. We rattled into Barnstaple, which was a slightly frumpish, down-at-heels town on both banks of the muddy river.

It was raining. The train passengers looked bored. But it was not boredom—it was the habitual patience that stiffened the English like a kind of hard glaze.

Our arrival made them talkative. Few risked the subject of the Falklands War; it was only after the most violent incidents that people discussed it. They talked cautiously about the weather, their children, their health. "It's the bugloss that gets me this time of year," Mrs. Badgworthy said. And her friend Joan said, "I do hope they have a dry fortnight in Majorca"—worrying about someone else's weather.

Barnstaple had become a sorry town. Once it had been a large railway junction, with three stations. Now it had only one station, and the line stopped dead, miles from the coast, leaving Barnstaple nowhere. It had a damp, haunted look that was partly dereliction and partly the result of the demolishing or conversion of its best buildings. Queen Anne's Walk, an elegant colonnade and building that had served as a riverside quay and bustling office for merchants and seamen for three hundred years, was now the Barnstaple Old People's Rest Centre—a worthy but melancholy end. It was a silted-up seaport at the end of a withering railway line.

For the first time in weeks I saw crowds of hikers. They were young, they looked healthy, they had orange rucksacks, many were Americans. They had no intention of lingering in Barnstaple; they were setting out for Clovelly and Hartland Point, and their numbers discouraged me from doing the same. I felt somewhat inhibited: I imagined many of them to be travel-writers, with knapsacks full of notes. They asked me intelligent probing questions. I ran into the hikers all over town—I was fair game: I had a knapsack, too, and oily shoes and a rain-spattered map. Where was I going? What was I doing? They asked for details I could not supply. I escaped to Ilfracombe, on the north coast.

The point about Ilfracombe, surely, was that it had not been designed for cars. It was a classic railway resort, with tall hotels and sloping streets. It had been built on a very steep hillside and was full of shifting perspectives of the Bristol Channel. There was a VACANCIES sign in every window. I could imagine people pouring out of the now-defunct Ilfracombe Station and heading for all those boardinghouses. In the twenties and thirties, Welshmen came by the thousands on the steam packets from across the water, and roistered up and down Ilfracombe, squandering their return fare on beer. It was a town for the stroller, not the driver. It was hard for cars to negotiate the streets, which were very steep and narrow; there was nowhere to park; and these hills made cars dangerous. Motor traffic had just about destroyed this dramatic seaside antique.

The dark clouds over Ilfracombe turned the grass on the great swollen headlands very green. Henry James had tiptoed around the town in 1872 and found it overplanned and a little gimcrack. He usually objected to the settled and bricked-up look of the English watering places, but in Ilfracombe he sighed when he saw the handrails and signboards and the old ladies and sheep, and he wished with all his heart for "something more pathless, more idle, more unreclaimed from ... deep-bosomed nature." Of course, Ilfracombe now looked much more used and worn-out than it had then; but not far from it, and on many parts of the North Devon coast, it was easy to find deep-bosomed nature—just that, in fact, because the headlands were magnificent and bosomy and between them was always a steepness that the locals called a cleave.

I walked to Hele Bay and Watermouth Cove. They were wooded and full of pink and blue wildflowers. There were pale spring flowers everywhere. No one could tell me their names. I came to Big Meadow and saw a sign:

Welcome to Big Meadow!

Sorry: No Motorcycles

No Groups of Men

No Dogs

Combe Martin, farther on, was a small village on a rocky bay, in the shadow of two tall hills, the Little Hangman and the Great Hangman. As I walked into it, I could see the whole of it at the head of the bay—the houses, the bars, the hotels, the church—and then I was on its only street, strolling past the cottages. Their windows were open. At one I heard, "... seven more Argentine aircraft have been shot down" from a radio, and farther on, another radio saying that so far four hundred and fifty men had been killed in the Falklands' fighting.

I found a place to sleep, by traipsing through the town in my usual fashion and sizing up the likely places. I had a shower and dinner—a pollock caught a few hours ago off this coast, and apple and bilberry pie. There were English people in the dining room, talking in whispers about food in a shy hungry way as they ate.

It was in little country villages like Combe Martin that I saw the wildest and scruffiest youths, motorcyclists mostly—the sort banned from Big Meadow—who modeled themselves on Hell's Angels. I could not explain why they were most numerous in the prettiest villages in the countryside. They played pool in pubs with names like the Old Haymow and the Ploughman's Inn (these places now had jukeboxes and video machines), and they had tattoos and leather trousers and chains. They were the last people I expected to see in the depths of this countryfied coast, and it was oddest of all to see them, as I did in Combe Martin, drinking the local ale beside grizzled shepherds and fishermen. The commonest nighttime sound in the English coastal village, apart from the endlessly grieving surf, was that of the motorcycles farting down the main road at midnight.

The hotel people in Ilfracombe and Combe Martin said business was terrible this year. Last year was terrible too. They had never known it to be so bad. They had very few firm reservations.

Mr. Deedy at the Bull said, "See, no one wants to make plans ahead. They go on working. It's not only the money. They don't like to go away, because they don't know whether they'll have jobs to go back to."

Then "Falklands Special" was on television, and we dutifully trooped toward Mrs. Deedy's shout of "It's the news!" The news was very bad: more deaths, more ships sunk. But there was always great bewilderment among people watching the news, because there was never enough of it and it was sometimes contradictory. Why were there so few photographs of fighting? Usually it was reporters speaking of disasters over crackly telephones. The English seemed—in private—ashamed and confused, and regarded Argentina as pathetic, ramshackle, and unlucky, with a conscript army of very young boys. They hated discussing it, but they could talk all night on the subject of how business was bad.

"You just reminded me," Mrs. Deedy said. "The Smiths have canceled. They had that September booking. Mr. Smith rang this morning."

"Knickers," Mr. Deedy said.

"His wife died," Mrs. Deedy said.

"Oh?" Mr. Deedy was doubtful—sorry he had said knickers.

"She wasn't poorly," Mrs. Deedy said. "It was a heart attack."

Mr. Deedy relaxed at the news of the heart attack. It was no one's fault, really—not like a sickness or a crime. This was more a kind of removal.

"That's another returned deposit," Mrs. Deedy said. She was cross.

"That makes two so far," Mr. Deedy said. "Let's hope there aren't any more."

The next day I heard two tattling ladies talking about the Falklands. It was being said that the British had become jingoistic because of the war, and that a certain swagger was now evident. It was true of the writing in many newspapers, but it was seldom true of the talk I heard. Most people were like Mrs. Mullion and Miss Custis at the Britannia in Combe Martin, who, after some decent platitudes, wandered from talk of the Falklands to extensive reminiscing about the Second World War.

"After all, the Germans were occupying France, but life went 011 as normal," Mrs. Mullion said.

"Well, this is just it," Miss Custis said. "You've got to carry on. No sense packing up."

"We were in Taunton then."

"Were you? We were Cullompton," Miss Custis said. "Mutterton, actually."

"Rationing seemed to go on for ages!" Mrs. Mullion said.

"I still remember when chocolate went off the ration. And then people bought it all. And then it went on the ration again!"

They had begun to cheer themselves up in this way.

"More tea?" Mrs. Mullion said.

"Lovely," Miss Custis said.

That was the day I left Combe Martin. I walked out of the village and climbed a thousand feet to the top of the Great Hangman. Down below I could see a headland that looked like a dog crouching with his snout in a puddle—the puddle being the Bristol Channel. Across the water, South Wales was a faint foreign blue.

There were steep cleaves, beautiful and exhausting, all the way to Lynton. The hills rose plumply from the water's edge, and the path circled the hollows, treeless here and with such a pitch that, descending them, I usually slid and lost my balance, and, climbing, I found myself taking rapid stabbing steps that made my ankles sore. There was nothing to grasp, nothing to break my fall. In the middle of the cleave, way down and flowing from the head of the long valley, there was always a creek or a river, looking sometimes like a snail track and sometimes like a snake. It was this way for fifteen miles.

At the bottom of one winding path was the village of Trentishoe. In 1891 it had a population of ninety-seven; now it had been reduced to forty-five. The church ("the second smallest in Devon") was the size of a one-car garage. I had said I was not going to do any sightseeing, but the village was nowhere and the church was insignificant and very pretty, so I went in. It smelled of Bible bindings and brass polish. Its list of rectors went back to the year 1260, seven hundred years accounted for. A notice said that a number of the graves in the churchyard were unknown people whose bodies had washed up on the shore in Elwill Bay, below this church, St. Peter's.

I left the path near Heddon's Mouth and took the steepest way across the cut, on stony patches between the clumps of heather, and tugged back by thorns, and on all fours through the wildflowers, and skidding on loose chippings of shale. I found it slow going, but I was in no particular hurry. After that high hill I came to Martinhoe and then to a headland full of trees. These woods were wrecked and looked wonderful. It was called Woody Bay and was littered with fallen trees. They had blown down in the winter's hurricane-force winds and blocked most of the paths, making this part of the coast tangled and wild, with great splintered tree trunks. It was a marvelous ruin—still-alive trees fractured all over the floor of the woods.

There was a motor road to the Valley of Rocks. I had seen very few people all day; but this place, on every map, because Shelley had praised it and because it had a parking lot, had a hundred people clambering over the rocks and yelling. The rock piles had good names, such as Mother Meldrum's Cave and the White Lady and the Devil's Cheese Ring, but I skipped on to Lynton just the same.

There was once a railway to Lynton. It was not open long, about sixty years. There was still a club in the village called the Lynton and Barnstaple Railway Association. Normally I had no interest in railway clubs and I avoided the company of railway buffs; but I liked the motto of this railway association in Lynton: "Perchance it is not dead, but sleepeth..."

***

At about five-thirty in the afternoon, just after tea, everyone left Lynton. It became a deserted village and seemed to slumber there on the crest of the hill until the next morning, when it woke again with the hullaballoo of people. I thought the people went to Lynmouth, four hundred feet down the cliff on a small harbor. Old guidebooks called Lynmouth "one of the loveliest villages in England." But the people did not go to Lynmouth—that village was empty, too, full of VACANCIES signs and very quiet saloon bars and dim whispers; the only full-throated sound was that of the tide battering the seawall. The light was strange in these sister villages above and below the pinnacles of cliff; facing north and tucked into a cove, they lost the sun in the afternoon, so they were lit by the gleaming Channel and the near-mirage of Wales. But Lynmouth remained a cool glade, rather damp and sheltered on the banks of the two rivers that rose in Exmoor and converged among a battered and rather scoured-looking water course.

Lynmouth had a rearranged, half-put-away appearance, because thirty years ago much of it had been demolished by a torrent of water. Even now, people visited the village to examine the damage done by the Great Lynmouth Flood Disaster. But where did they go after tea?

A street-sweeper named Mr. Bedge told me the people were from Butlin's Holiday Camp in Minehead, eighteen miles away.

I said, "But there are thousands of people!"

"It's a big camp," Mr. Bedge said.

I liked the liquid evening light in Lynmouth, but the village was clammy and full of shadows. Lynton had a whiter light, more sky, and a breeze; and even deserted, it looked rather dignified and old-fashioned on its clifftop.

Next month there would be a movie one day a week in Lynton.

"But if there are thirty people at that film show the owner will be pleased, and if there's fifty it'll be a bloody miracle," Sid Henry told me.

Mrs. Henry said, "We're dying on our feet."

There was a great deal of talk at the Henrys' and all over the village of Lorna Doone, which was set just down the road toward Porlock. But it was another example of literature giving an area an importance that in time had displaced the book. No one here had read Lorna Doone, but that didn't matter, because the district had already been hallowed by it, and now it was seen in a kind of blurred and respectful way. How could you possibly disparage a place that had inspired a famous novel?

But there was a greater source of interest at the Henrys'. This was the honeymoon couple, a frail young man and a big laughing woman who was about five years older than her new husband. A silence fell over the dining room when the couple came down to breakfast: the Campbells stared into their porridge (they were Australian—nervous and uncritical); the Hibberts, from London, became small and watchful; and I pretended to read the newspaper. B. and G. Chandler (that was how it went in the Guests' Register, always one of my favorite books at any overnight stop) were the honeymoon couple. They took their seats at breakfast, and she talked and he squinted. Mr. Chandler looked terrible—pale, squinting, rather beaten; and Mrs. Chandler was robust, rosy-cheeked, full of talk, as if perhaps she fed off him at night. She made the plans—"Let's go to Clovelly today"—and he just sat there, grimacing.

We wanted to hear him say something. We wanted to know what he was thinking. Most of all we wanted him to assert himself ("I can't take much more of this!"), but in two days he never spoke. He listened, he squinted, he grew a bit smaller; but that was all. And then the Just Married signs that had been stuck to their bumper and the Honeymooners! that had been scrawled in soap on the car doors vanished, and by the time they left Lynton, the Chandlers looked as though they had been married for twenty years.

I left Lynton on the Cliff Railway, a cable car that descended to Lynmouth. I took a bus to Porlock, ten miles away. The road cut across the north of Exmoor, a rather brown forbidding place, and down the long Porlock Hill. The roads were so steep, there were signs on ramps saying, "Danger—Escape for Runaway Vehicles—No Parking" and "Warning to Pedestrians—Do Not Loiter Near This Bend—Danger from Vehicles Out of Control."

Porlock, the home of the man who interrupted the writing of "Kubla Khan," was one street of small cottages, with a continuous line of cars trailing through it. Below it, on the west side of the bay, was Porlock Weir, and there were hills on all sides that were partly wooded.

A hundred and seventy years ago a man came to Porlock and found it quiet. But he did not find fault. He wrote: "There are periods of comparative stagnation, when we say, even in London, that there is nothing stirring; it is therefore not surprising that there should be some seasons of the year when things are rather quiet in West Porlock."

I walked toward Allerford, and on the way fell into conversation with a woman feeding birds in her garden. She told me the way to Minehead—not the shortest way, but the prettiest way, she said. She had light hair and dark eyes. I said her house was beautiful. She said it was a guest house; then she laughed. "Why don't you stay tonight?" She meant it and seemed eager, and then I was not sure what she was offering. I stood there and smiled back at her. The sun was shining gold on the grass and the birds were taking the crumbs in a frenzied way. It was not even one o'clock, and I had never stopped at a place this early in the day.

I said, "Maybe I'll come back some time."

"I'll still be here," she said, laughing a bit sadly.

There was an ancient bridge at Allerford. I by-passed it and cut into the woods, climbing toward the hill called Selworthy Beacon. The woods were full of singing birds, warblers and thrushes; and then I heard the unmistakable sound of a cuckoo, which was as clear as a clock, striking fifteen. The sun was strong, the gradient was easy, the bees were buzzing, there was a soft breeze; and I thought: This was what I was looking for when I set out this morning—though I had no idea I would find it here.

All travelers are optimists, I thought. Travel itself was a sort of optimism in action. I always went along thinking: I'll be all right, I'll be interested, I'll discover something, I won't break a leg or get robbed, and at the end of the day I'll find a nice old place to sleep. Everything is going to be fine, and even if it isn't, it will be worthy of note—worth leaving home for. Sometimes the weather, even the thin rain of Devon, made it worth it. Or else the birdsong in sunlight, or the sound of my shoe soles on the pebbles of the downward path—here, for example, walking down North Hill through glades full of azaleas, which were bright purple. I continued over the humpy hills to Minehead.

9. The West Somerset Railway

TO THE EAST, beyond the gray puddly foreshore—the tide was out half a mile—I saw the bright flags of Butlin's, Minehead, and vowed to make a visit. Ever since Bognor I had wanted to snoop inside a coastal holiday camp, but I had passed the fences and gates without going in. It was not possible to make a casual visit. Holiday camps were surrounded by prison fences, with coils of barbed wire at the top. There were dog patrols and beware signs stenciled with skulls. The main entrances were guarded and had turnstiles and a striped barrier that was raised to let certain vehicles through. Butlin's guests had to show passes in order to enter. The whole affair reminded me a little of Jonestown.

And these elaborate security measures fueled my curiosity. What exactly was going on in there? It was no use my peering through the chain-link fence—all I could see at this Butlin's were the Boating Lake and the reception area and some snorers on deck chairs. Clearly, it was very large. Later I discovered that the camp was designed to accommodate fourteen thousand people. That was almost twice the population of Minehead! They called it "Butlinland" and they said it had everything.

I registered as a Day Visitor. I paid a fee. I was given a brochure and a booklet and Your Holiday Programme, with a list of the day's events. The security staff seemed wary of me. I had ditched my knapsack in a boardinghouse, but I was still wearing my leather jacket and oily hiking shoes. My knees were muddy. So as not to alarm the gatekeepers, I had pocketed my binoculars. Most of the Butlin's guests wore sandals and short sleeves, and some wore funny hats—holiday high spirits. The weather was overcast and cold and windy. The flags out front were as big as bedsheets and made a continual cracking. I was the only person at Butlin's dressed for this foul weather. I felt like a commando. It made some people there suspicious.

With its barrackslike buildings and its forbidding fences, it had the prison look of the Butlin's at Bognor. A prison look was also an army-camp look, and just as depressing. This one was the more scary for being brightly painted. It had been tacked together out of plywood and tin panels in primary colors. I had not seen flimsier buildings in England. They were so ugly, they were not pictured anywhere in the Butlin's brochure, but instead shown as simplified floor plans in blue diagrams. They were called "flatlets" and "suites." The acres of barracks were called the Accommodation Area.

It really was like Jonestown! The Accommodation Area with the barracks was divided into camps—Green, Yellow, Blue, and Red Camp. There was a central dining room and a Nursery Center. There was a Camp Chapel. There was also a miniature railway and a chairlift and a monorail—all of them useful: it was a large area to cover on foot. It was just the sort of place the insane preacher must have imagined when he brought his desperate people to Guyana. It was self-contained and self-sufficient. With a fence that high, it had to be.

The Jonestown image was powerful, but Butlin's also had the features of a tinselly New Jerusalem. This, I felt, would be the English coastal town of the future, if most English people had their way. It was already an English town of a sort—glamorized and less substantial than the real thing, but all the same recognizably an English town, with the usual landmarks, a cricket pitch, a football field, a launderette, a supermarket, a bank, a betting shop, and a number of take-away food joints. Of course, it was better organized and had more amenities than most English towns the same size—that was why it was popular. It was also a permanent fun fair. One of Butlin's boasts was "No dirty dishes to wash!" Another was "There is absolutely no need to queue!" No dishwashing, no standing in line—it came near to parody, like a vacation in a Polish joke. But these promises were a sort of timid hype; England was a country of modest expectations, and no dishes and no lines were part of the English dream.

It was not expensive—£178 ($313) a week for a family of four, and that included two meals a day. It was mostly families—young parents with small children. They slept in a numbered cubicle in the barracks at one of the four camps, and they ate at a numbered table in one of the dining rooms, and they spent the day amusing themselves.

The Windsor Sports Ground (most of the names had regal echoes, an attempt at respectability) and the Angling Lake were not being used by anyone the day I was there. But the two snooker and table tennis rooms were very busy; each room was about half the size of a football field and held scores of tables. No waiting! There was bingo in the Regency Building, in a massive room with a glass wall, which was the bottom half of the indoor swimming pool—fluttering legs and skinny feet in water the color of chicken bouillon. There was no one on the Boating Lake, and no one in the outdoor pool, and the chapel was empty. The Crazy Golf was not popular. So much for the free amusements.

"Yes, it is true, nearly everything at Butlin's is free!" the brochure said.

But what most of the people were doing was not free. They were feeding coins into fruit machines and one-armed bandits in the Fun Room. They were playing pinball. They were also shopping for stuffed toys and curios, or buying furs in the Fur Shop, or getting their hair done at the Hairdressing Salon. They were eating. The place had four fish-and-chip shops. There were tea shops, coffee bars, and candy stores. They cost money, but people seemed to be spending fairly briskly. They were also drinking. There were about half a dozen bars. The Embassy Bar (Greek statues, fake chandeliers, red wallpaper) was quite full, although it was the size of a barn. The Exmoor Bar had a hundred and fifty-seven tables and probably held a thousand drinkers. It was the scale of the place that was impressive—the scale and the shabbiness.

It was not Disneyland. Disneyland was a blend of technology and farce. It was mostly fantasy, a tame kind of surrealism, a comfortable cartoon in three dimensions. But the more I saw of Butlin's, the more it resembled English life; it was very close to reality in its narrowness, its privacies, and its pleasures. It was England without work—leisure had been overtaken by fatigue and dullwittedness: electronic games were easier than sports, and eating junk food had become another recreation. No one seemed to notice how plain the buildings were, how tussocky the grass was, or that everywhere there was a pervasive sizzle and smell of food frying in hot fat.

In that sense, too, it was like a real town. People walked around believing that it was all free; but most pastimes there cost money, and some were very expensive—like a ticket to the cabaret show that night, Freddie and the Dreamers, a group of middle-aged musicians who were a warmed-over version of their sixties' selves.

If it had a futuristic feel, it was the deadened imagination and the zombie-like attitude of the strolling people, condemned to a week or two of fun under cloudy skies. And it was also the arrangements for children. The kids were taken care of—they could be turned loose in Butlin's in perfect safety. They couldn't get hurt or lost. There was a high fence around the camp. There was a Nursery Chalet Patrol and a Child Listening Service and a large Children's Playground. In the planned cities of the future, provisions like this would be made for children.

Most of the events were for children, apart from whist and bingo. As a Day Visitor, I had my choice of the Corona Junior Fancy Dress Competition, a Kids' Quiz Show, the Trampoline Test, the Donkey Derby, or the Beaver and Junior Talent Contest Auditions. The Donkey Derby was being held in a high wind on Gaiety Green—screaming children and plodding animals. I went to the talent show auditions in the Gaiety Revue Theatre. A girl of eight did a suggestive dance to a lewd pop song; two sisters sang a song about Jesus; Amanda and Kelly sang "Daisy"; and Miranda recited a poem much too fast. Most of the parents were elsewhere—playing the one-armed bandits and drinking beer.

I wandered into the Camp Chapel ("A Padre is available in the Centre at all times"). There was a notice stuck to the chapel door: At all three services prayers are being said for our Forces in the Southern Atlantic. I scrutinized the Visitors' Book. It asked for nationality, and people had listed "Welsh" or "Cornish" or "English" or "Scottish" next to their names. There was a scattering of Irish. But after the middle of April people had started to put "British" for nationality—that was after the Falklands War had begun.

I found three ladies having tea in the Regency Building. Daphne Bunsen, from Bradford, said, "We don't talk about this Falklands business here, 'cause we're on holiday. It's a right depressing soobject."

"Anyway," Mavis Hattery said, "there's only one thing to say."

What was that?

"I say, 'Get it over with! Stop playing cat and mouse!'"

Mrs. Bunsen said they loved Butlin's. They had been here before and would certainly come back. Their sadness was they could not stay longer. "And Mavis' room is right posh!"

"I paid a bit extra," Mrs. Hattery said. "I have a fitted carpet in my shally."

It was easy to mock Butlin's for its dreariness and its brainless pleasures. It was an inadequate answer to leisure, but there were scores of similar camps all around the coast, so there was no denying its popularity. It combined the security and equality of prison with the vulgarity of an amusement park. I asked children what their parents were doing. Usually the father was playing billiards and the mother was shopping, but many said their parents were sleeping—having a kip. Sleeping until noon, not having to cook or mind children, and being a few steps away from the chippy, the bar, and the betting shop—it was a sleazy paradise in which people were treated more or less like animals in a zoo. In time to come, there would be more holiday camps on the British coast—"Cheap and cheerful," Daphne Bunsen said.

Butlin's was staffed by "Redcoats"—young men and women who wore red blazers. It was a Redcoat named Rod Firsby who told me that the camp could accommodate fourteen thousand people ("but nine thousand is about average"). Where did the people come from? I asked. He said they came from all over. It was when I asked him what sorts of jobs they did that he laughed.

"Are you joking, sunshine?" he said.

I said no, I wasn't.

He said, "Half the men here are unemployed. That's the beauty of Butlin's—you can pay for it with your dole money."

***

After Butlin's, my boardinghouse in the lower town seemed very tame. There were thirteen fragrant old ladies in residence for a week. They gushed about places like Wimbleball Reservoir and Clatworthy and Dunkery Beacon and the castle at Dunster. Sometimes they mentioned Lorna Doone in respectful tones. But they had read the novel. They were retired Welsh schoolteachers, very sweet-natured and precise and knowledgeable.

One night I watched Damien-Omen II with eight of them in the so-called T.V. Lounge—the back parlor, with extra chairs. I was astonished at the silliness of the movie, but I looked around the room and saw that the Welsh ladies were squinting seriously at it. It was so preposterous, I wanted to hoot. The Devil's son was somehow living with an American family—the fact that they were obscenely rich and living like lords in Chicago was supposed to make it believable. The Devil's son had flinty eyes and went to a military academy, where periodically he reverted to his devilish self, calling down Satan's wrath on the school bullies. There was often a shiny crow overhead, croaking and doing damage—wreaking havoc was how one was supposed to view it. Nothing in this plot made me regret that I had missed Omen I, but because I had missed it, I had to ask questions of the Welsh ladies. I always got prompt replies.

"Who is that man?"

"One of the Devil's Disciples," Miss Ellis said, with a slewed Welsh emphasis on the last syllable.

Some of the ladies were knitting. One read a newspaper during the commercial breaks. They chatted about Wimbleball and Dunster. But they were silent during the movie. Only I spoke up—because I was confused.

"What's that statue?"

"Oh, that will be the Whore of Babylon, I expect," Miss Thomas said in her sweet Welsh voice.

The little brat had 666 inscribed on his scalp.

"That's the Number of the Beast," Miss Ellis said.

But I hadn't asked.

"Revelations," Miss Parry-Williams said.

Toward midnight, after most of the characters had been murdered by the Devil's son, the film ended. The parlor was now filled with the syrupy smell of the Welsh ladies' cologne. They stifled yawns and stood up.

Miss Thomas said, "I shouldn't be a bit surprised if we saw Omen Three before very long! Good night, Gwyneth; good night, Alice: good night—"

***

The schoolteachers made me impatient to see Wales. They looked English, but their demeanor was amused and remote. They whispered at breakfast, they were very polite, even circumspect; they behaved as though in a foreign land.

There was no path on this stretch of coast to Bristol. I put my maps aside and took the West Somerset Railway. It was Britain's longest private line—twenty-five miles, operating between Minehead and Taunton. The British Rail service had ended in 1971. The West Somerset line was both a passion and a business for the people who ran it; some were volunteers. The station at Minehead had been preserved as a sort of usable antique, full of nostalgic signs advertising cigarettes and motor oil. That aspect—the backward-looking part of it—rather irritated me. The trouble with railway buffs was that they were not really interested in going anywhere. They were playing—taking photographs, posing on locomotives, collecting engine numbers. They relished the dusty aesthetics of railway lore.

They especially liked dressing up. That seemed to be part of the English character—entering into fantasy, putting on different clothes, and setting the old dull personality aside. It was what made amateur dramatics in England so energetic; drag acts here were so humorous that they did not need the justification of being wholesome. And so much of English life required costumes—clothes represented freedom or power or a new self. The members of the House of Lords wore ermine, and Oxbridge students wore robes, and even milkmen wore distinctive leather jerkins; and there was no more serious boast than a bowler hat. It was the railway buff who crossed the thin line between dressing up and travesty—the English seldom bothered to make much of a distinction between the two in any case. The reward for restarting a railway line was the chance to dress up as a Stationmaster or a Conductor or a Guard or even a Sweeper—with a uniform and special buttons and a distinct kind of hat.

The train was full of joy-riders pretending to be passengers; there and back, that was always the railway buff's itinerary. They liked the atmosphere. They took pictures of each other and of the woodwork and steam. We went along the shore to Dunster and its dark brown castle ("The Dutch embossed leather hangings are outstanding"), then on to Watchet, turning inland for Williton. Still the railway buffs snapped pictures and marveled at the old signs—"Woodbines" and "Pratt's Motor Spirit" and "Craven 'A'—Will Not Affect Your Throat." I gathered that these signs excited memories of the old days, when there were hundreds of trains like this rattling through the English hills. At just the point where the railway buff's excitement was at its most feverish ("Crikey, Rafe, don't it take you back?"), and they began unpacking sandwiches from their hampers and setting up their thermos flasks of hot tea, the train stopped at Bishops Lydeard and everyone was ordered out. We were put onto a bus and taken in silence to Taunton. So the West Somerset Railway was something like Butlin's Holiday Camp—lots of razzmatazz but not much substance. Somehow it was not the answer to the transport need in that part of Somerset.

***

On the 14:21 to Weston-super-Mare a man named Wilf pinched a piece of cigarette paper into a little gutter and then dropped strings of tobacco into it. He licked it and rolled it and twisted one end—it looked like a firecracker—and then turned to me and said, "Any idea what time we get to Bristol?"

I said I didn't know. "I'm going to Weston-super-Mare."

He set his cigarette on fire and then took it out of his mouth and said sheesh, expelling the smoke. "Better you than me."

And then, perhaps because he knew I was going to Weston-super-Mare, Wilf avoided me and showed no interest in conversation. Or perhaps my knapsack had put him off? And yet I found that wearing a knapsack was a kind of advertisement of willingness, and more than anything it stirred the English passion for giving directions. Giving directions here was a form of conversation. But Wilf just smoked and sulked, and when I got off the train he shook his head, as if indicating that I was making a big mistake.

Under a dark collapsing sky, Weston-super-Mare looked bleak and residential and rather funless. Like Bexhill and Worthing and some other places on the south coast, it was a large town with the soul of a suburb. And it was in such places that I regretted the endless roads of flat housefronts and pined for a little vulgarity or something vicious. In Weston-super-Mare I was directed to the Waxworks.

On the way there, down the Promenade, I saw that the wind had whipped the water into troughs. Even in this poor light there was a wonderful view—of Wales, of the two black islands, Flat Holm and Steep Holm, and at the end of the beach a curved loaf-shaped landspit called Brean Down. The beach was long and mostly empty and very gray, and it was flatter than the water. Parked on the sand, as in a cartoon of desert mirages, were a red Punch and Judy booth and two yellow huts, one labeled TEA-STALL and the OTHER SHELLFISH BAR. A flapping pennant said DONKEY RIDES—20 PENCE. The few people on the beach lay heavily bundled-up on the sand, like war wounded on a beachhead. Their faces were tight with discomfort. A fat old lady with wild hair, wearing a winter coat but barefoot, stood and howled, "Arthur!" The donkeys stamped and shuddered in a little group, looking thoroughly baffled. And here on the Promenade hunched-over ladies with big handbags tipped their stoutness into the wind and breathed loudly through their teeth. Across the street at the Winter Gardens people were buying tickets for tonight's show, Cavalcade of Song. Beyond the donkeys, beyond the fat barefoot lady and the Punch and Judy booth, a new island surfaced and sprouted trees. Then I saw it was a ship going by.

I was so unaccustomed to a place like Weston-super-Mare that with a little concentration I saw it in a surrealistic way. What were all these different things doing there? They had accumulated over the years, slowly, piling up like the tidewrack, and because it had happened so slowly, no one questioned it or found it strange. And this was also why I could spend days in the seaside resorts, fascinated by the way the natural coast had been deranged and cluttered. It did not matter much whether a town was pretty or ugly—anyway, ugly ones were often the most telling. The image of the tidewrack was accurate in some places, but other towns were like river mouths, where, mounting like silt, a century of pulverized civilization had been deposited, having floated from the darker interior of England.

At the Waxworks there were models of movie stars and sports figures on the first floor, and on the next floor there were murderers. The top floor showed various torture chambers. In his essay "The Decline of the English Murder," George Orwell wrote, "If one examines the murders which have given the greatest amount of pleasure to the British public, the murders whose story is known in its general outline to almost everyone and which have been made into novels and rehashed over and over again by the Sunday papers, one finds a fairly strong family resemblance running through the greater number of them." The "family resemblance" is a quiet respectable man who reluctantly decides on murder because it seems less disgraceful than, for example, being caught in adultery; the crime is meticulously planned and carried out—but there is a tiny slip and the murderer is caught. "With this kind of background, a crime can have dramatic and even tragic qualities which make it memorable and excite pity for both victim and murderer."

The murderers shown at the Waxworks suited this analysis, and they also illustrated the decline. Here was the Yorkshire Ripper (Peter Sutcliff) and the Black Panther (Donald Neilson). The Waxworks was popular partly because the English were law-abiding, and no one knows more inner turmoil or is so susceptible to the romance of wrongdoing than the law-abiding person. But it was also popular for a much more straightforward reason: in British law the criminal's privacy—and very often his identity—is strenuously protected. A man may murder and be caught and be found guilty without the public ever seeing his face. No picture of the Black Panther had ever been published. So the revelation of the wax figures excited the watcher like certain kinds of pornography, and the gory tableaux on the top floor—a whipping, a beheading, "The Death of a Thousand Cuts," had a similar interest for a person secretly starved for a bit of raw cruelty. It was like breaking a taboo, even though most of the murderers looked silly in lopsided wigs, and the torture victims looked like big shattered steak-and-kidney pies.

And perhaps there was a connection between murderers and seaside resorts. Typically, the murderer committed his crime—wife-poisoning was the stereotype—and then went to a watering place like Weston-super-Mare, because it was easy to blend in with the ill-assorted types who were found there. And he was caught on the Promenade. It was one of the paradoxes of English life that the most respectable-looking places and the most innocent circumstances excited the strongest suspicions of crime.

The next day I took the train to Bristol. I tried to interest myself in the St. Paul's District, where race riots had broken out the year before. There were gutted buildings, and some still stank of burned mattresses, but otherwise it seemed an ordinary slum. I spoke to an Indian sociologist, Dr. Barot, who said that the West Indian household had been very authoritarian. In the course of a generation or two the parents' authority had been weakened and the children had stopped submitting. In fact, the children had become British; but there was no work, there was anger and aimlessness, and very few bothered to study at the higher levels. Only a handful of blacks attended Bristol University.

"I could introduce you to some really angry blacks," a man named Fletcher said at my Bristol boardinghouse.

But then the weather turned fine again and I decided that, instructive though it would be to meet some really angry blacks in Bristol, it had not been my intention on this coastal jaunt to invite gloom. And in a general sort of way, I knew why they were angry. So I declined the introduction and crossed the River Severn, which at that point was also the sea.

10. The 16:28 to Tenby

"IT'S THAT BUBBLE CAR over there," Mr. Crabb the guard said at Temple Meads Station in Bristol. He pointed to a three-car train, the sort I had been seeing on branch lines. I was now headed for Cardiff. A man named Hicks on this train said that he could remember the days when the Red Dragon Express ran to Cardiff—and here we were, he said, on this manky little train! I did not encourage him. I liked these trains, because it was possible to sit behind the driver in the first coach and look straight out the front window at the tracks ahead. And it was always interesting to watch the driver's busy hands on the controls.

"We're pushing towards Stanley," Mr. Hicks said.

He meant in the Falkland Islands. He was reading over my shoulder—Falklands news in my Times. I asked his opinion of the war.

He said, "We have to do it. Our land's been taken. The Argies have to be stopped. They can't get away with it." He looked out the window and grunted. "That's how Hitler got started!"

The train was rolling. On that line, you did not leave Bristol until you left England, because its suburbs straggled all the way to the Severn Tunnel, ten miles of housing estates and factories. As in other parts of England, the newer industrial buildings looked frail and temporary.

The tunnel lasted a minute or so, and then we were traveling in a deep ditch. But I knew from the brown stones of the ditch walls, and the way they were cut and pointed, that we must be in Wales—although I could not see anything but a strip of blue sky and these walls. This was confirmed at the next stop, Cyfforded Twnel Hafren, Severn Tunnel Junction.

We surfaced in Wales, and at once the landscape looked different: meadows and crooked hills and all the hawthorns in bloom. The factories were distant smudges. I had traveled enough in the past month to know that it was possible to tell which part of England I was in by the way the fields were marked—whether by a wall or a hedge or a fence, and what kind. The white hawthorns had been planted at the boundaries of every field, in a way I had never seen before: we were in another country. It was in fact a nation of like-minded people. The bilingual signs {Welcome/Croeso) were as unnecessary as the road signs in Canada, but like Canada's they served a political purpose—a cheap sop tossed to the nationalists.

We passed a tumbledown farm, a small wood-frame factory, a row of poplars, some sheep. Now I understood why the Welsh had taken to Patagonia. I saw more farms, small and poor, but rural poverty always looked to me more bearable than the forms that poverty took in a city. Poverty brought people low and pushed them into the past. In the countryside this merely meant farming in a cruder way; poor city people had to go still farther back and become scavengers in order to survive.

Newport rose up on the left, a power station and the rolling mills and furnaces of the doomed Llanwern Steelworks. The Victorian housefronts looked slightly foppish, with multicolored bricks and stripes. Sometimes Wales looked like another country, and at other times it seemed like an earlier version of England—upright and antique and dusty and churchgoing, with all the color schemes wrong.

There were preparations afoot in Cardiff for the Pope's visit—he was due in three days. An altar had been erected and a "mass site" prepared up at Pontcanna Park in Llandaf, near the old cathedral ("Cromwell's soldiers used the nave as a tavern and post office, and the font as a pig trough, and burnt the cathedral's books at a formal ceremony at Cardiff Castle"). No Pope had ever visited Wales.

In Cardiff, on Queen Street, Mrs. Prichard said, "So the Pope's staying with you, Doris?"

"Yes? Oh, well, never mind," Doris said. "I'll make him comfortable."

"He'll want looking after," Mrs. Prichard went on, still not smiling. "He's got a healthy appetite, that one, all the traveling."

"I'll tell the milkman to leave me an extra pint," Doris said. "The Pope's stopping upstairs, I'll say."

"You'll want more than an extra pint of milk! I should buy some gammon and cabbage. He's Polish, Doris."

As soon as I saw it, I wanted to leave Cardiff. In any case, it was seldom my intention to linger in the large cities. In Britain they were cavernous and intimidating, like the fortresses they had once been. They seemed to have heavy eyebrows. They were not for walkers. They were full of indoor miseries that made me impatient. Their buildings were blackened and their people wary of my questions. I never got lost in the countryside, but these cities could make me feel as if I were drowning. It could take a day or two to find out how to leave these places. They were always encumbered with ruins. Cardiff was no place for a pedestrian like me.

My remedy, walking to Barry Island, did not work. It was a peninsula, but even so it was unreachable on foot. There were no paths here, only the mazy roads of South Glamorgan, packed solid with houses. In Grangetown I thought: They really do look like towns from years ago, living on in old-fashioned, semirespectable decrepitude. I walked on to Cogan, an awful-looking place. Wales was visibly poorer than England but much better-natured.

At Cadoxton I found a railway station and went the rest of the way on the branch line, sitting behind the driver. There were signs painted on the slates of house roofs: they were meant to be seen from the train. The letters were two feet high, GOD IS LOVE, one said, and another one, CHRIST DIED FOR THE UNGODLY. We passed several acres of rusty locomotives—a sort of graveyard for steam engines—and then came to Barry Island. Half of it was a Butlin's camp, and the rest was a small seafront with severe amusements.

I sat on the front, near a stall selling whelks and jellied eels, listening to the flap of the Butlin's flags and wondering what to do next. There were no hotels in this place! It was for day-trippers—miners mostly, who rode out of the valleys for one frantic day. But now miners earned good salaries and were able to go farther afield. So Barry Island had its holiday camp and its deserted arcades. I made a note: Not much like Weston-super-Mare —because Weston-super-Mare was twelve miles away, across the bay.

I studied my map and decided to go to Llanelli. My train took me past Bridgend and Port Talbot and Neath. The landscape was industrial and yet was motionless and might have been dead. It was also a pebbledash wilderness of two-story houses, great chains and terraces of them, arranged on narrow streets, striping the hills. It was nineteenth-century order, the workers' barracks, with rougher hills one range away—the Vale of Glamorgan and then into West Glamorgan. I changed trains in Swansea. Swansea was a vast cankered valley of sorrowful houses and gray churches and shut-down factories. I thought: No wonder the Welsh are religious! In South Wales, industry had burned and cleared the landscape and stacked it with sooty buildings. But most of the industries had failed—or looked moribund—and you could not look out the train window without thinking of gangrene.

Llanelli had looked promising on the map. It was in the southwest corner of Dyffed, on the estuary of the Loughor River. I walked from the station to the docks. The town was musty-smelling and dull and made of decayed bricks. My map had misled me. I wanted to leave, but first I wanted to buy a guidebook to Wales in order to avoid such mistakes in the future.

I passed a store with textbooks in the window. Dead flies lay on their sides on the book covers; they had not been swatted, but had simply starved; they seemed asleep. There were shelves in this bookstore, but not many books. There was no salesperson. A husky voice came from behind a beaded curtain.

"In here."

I went in. A man was whispering into a telephone. He paid no attention to me. There were plenty of books in here. On the covers were pictures of naked people. The room smelled of cheap paper and ink. The magazines were in cellophane wrappers. They showed breasts and rubber underwear, and there were children on some of them—the titles suggested that the naked tots were violated inside. No guidebooks here, but as this pornography shop was Welsh, the door had a bell that went bing-bong! in a cheery way as I left.

Welsh politeness was soft-hearted and smiling. Even Llanelli's Skinheads were well behaved, and the youths with swastikas on their leather jackets and bleached hair and earrings or green hair and T-shirts saying Anarchy! —even they seemed sweet-natured. And how amazing that the millions of Welsh, who shared about a dozen surnames, were the opposite of anonymous. They were conspicuous individuals and at a personal level tried hard to please. "You're a gentleman!" one man would cry to another, greeting him on the street.

At Jenkins the Bakers ("Every bite—pure delight") I saw a strawberry tart with clotted cream on top. Were they fresh strawberries?

"Oh, yes, fresh this morning," Mrs. Jenkins said.

I asked for one.

"But they're thirty pence, darling," Mrs. Jenkins said, warning me and not moving. She expected me to tell her to forget it. She was on my side in the most humane way, and gave me a commiserating smile, as if to say, It's a shocking amount of money for a strawberry tart!

When I bought two, she seemed surprised. It must have been my knapsack and my vagabond demeanor. I went around the corner and stuffed them into my mouth.

"Good morning—I mean, good evening!" Mr. Maddocks the stationmaster said at Llanelli Station. "I knew I'd get it right in the end. It's patience you want!"

The rest of the people on the platform were speaking Welsh, but on seeing the train draw in—perhaps it was the excitement—they lapsed into English.

This was the 16:28 to Tenby. We slid out of Llanelli, past the tiny cottages and the brick houses. The average price of these houses was £15,000 and quite a few cost less than £10,000. I got this information from the Llanelli Star. On another page some automobiles were being advertised for £7000.

Across the yellow-brown puddles of the Llanrhidian Sands was the lovely Gower Peninsula. We passed Burry Port and Kidwelly—there were rolling hills on one side and the muddy foreshore of the Gwendraeth estuary on the other. Then up the Tywi River to Carmarthen, which had a mundane grandeur—it needed either more ruins or fewer. After Carmarthen, the real countryside began—the first I had seen in South Wales since crossing the Severn. The hills were green and lumpish and the valleys tangled with short leafy trees, some standing as hedges and boundaries and others in jumbled woods. I always expected to see small ponies in this landscape; they would have suited it. The land pattern and the foliage was new to me. I liked its wildness—it looked wild from neglect, like a place that had once been neat but was now overgrown. It had an untrimmed charm—the grass too long, the boughs drooping, like the shaggy imagery in a Dylan Thomas poem. Thomas had lived four miles south of this railway line, at Laugharne on the River Taf.

Narberth was a small white iron-girt station in a green glade of whirling gnats, a beautiful place for the train to stop in the late-afternoon sun, and I felt a bit sad when we pulled out; and then sunset at Saundersfoot—I kept saying that phrase to myself—and Tenby, a town on a high cliff with more cliffs around it and boulder islands in its bay. It looked perfect. It was the loveliest town I had seen so far. I found a boardinghouse with a view of the harbor and made no plans to leave.

***

The elegant houses of Tenby standing tall on the cliff reminded me of beautifully bound books on a high shelf—their bow windows had the curvature of book spines. The town was elevated on a promontory, so the sea on three sides gave its light a penetrating purity that reached the market square and fortified the air with the tang of ocean-washed rocks. It was odd that a place so pretty should also be so restful, and yet that was the case. But Tenby was more than pretty. It was so picturesque, it looked like a watercolor of itself.

It had not been preserved by the fastidious tyrants who so often took over British villages—the new class who moved in and gutted the houses, and then, after restoring the thatched roofs and mullioned windows, hid a chromium kitchen in the inglenook, which ran on microchips. Such people could make a place so picturesque that it was uninhabitable. Tenby had been maintained, and it had mellowed; it was still sturdy, and I was glad I had found it. But it was the sort of place that denied a sense of triumph to the person who secretly felt he had discovered it—because its gracefulness was well known; it had been painted and praised; it was old even in Tudor times; and it had produced Augustus John (who wrote about Tenby in his autobiography, Chiaroscuro), as well as the inventor of the equal sign (=) in mathematics, Robert Recorde. But, then, there were no secret places in Britain that I had seen; there were only forgotten places, and places that were being buried or changed by our harsh century.

Tenby had been spared, and it was the more pleasing for being rather quiet and empty. I walked around dreamily. For the first time since I had set out on this trip I felt that a watering place was fulfilling its purpose—calming me, soothing me, making me want to snore over a book on a veranda with a sea view.

"This place is a madhouse in the summer," a publican named Nuttgens told me. "It's chock-a-block. Pavements full of tourists, roads full of cars. You can't move! And there's usually a tail-back all the way to Saundersfoot—"

It was hard to tell whether he was boasting or complaining, but in any case I did not want to imagine Tenby being trampled. I liked to think of it always like this, quietly lived in, with bookshelf terraces of houses and twisty streets and that marvelous gauzy light.

Nuttgens said, "Every business here is owned by an Englishman." He himself was from Birmingham. "And all the employees are Welsh."

I asked him why this was so.

He tapped the side of his nose with his finger, suggesting that the English were cleverer.

Other English people in Tenby also told me this, but it was not so. My landlady was Welsh, the pub across the street was owned by a Welshman, and there were Welsh names everywhere on shop signs. And yet it was true that part of Tenby's appeal was that its English elegance had been softened by Welsh charm, and it had the faintly asymmetrical look one often sees in the most dignified former colonies.

***

There was a coastal path that went from Tenby to St. Dogmaels. a hundred and seventy miles, around the shore of Pembrokeshire. I walked the few miles to Old Castle Head—the rocks at the shore had the look of lions' paws—and because I hated retracing my steps, I walked on to the nearest railway station and took the branch line to Pembroke Dock. This station was Manorbier Newton. We passed Hodgeston ("The church chancel contains a double piscina and mutilated triple sedilia"), and then strange events overtook the train. Or perhaps not strange but merely old-fashioned.

The train came to a sign at a road, saying, STOP: Open Crossing Gates Before Proceeding, and it stopped. The uniformed man who was both guard and ticket collector got out and swung the gates open wide enough so that they blocked the little motor road and unblocked the railway tracks. Then the train shuddered and the birds sang and the train moved across the road. The guard closed the gates, latched them, boarded the train, and we resumed our journey through meadows and farms and low woods.

There was another sign: STOP: Whistle Before Proceeding. The train obeyed—its whistle was a two-note trumpet blast—and we crossed the road. It was a hot afternoon, and the country roads smelled of warm tar and looked like dusty licorice; and we stopped at short platforms, halts in the middle of farms, and at Lamphey in a pasture, the cow parsley lazily brushing the sides of the train.

When most of the rural branch lines were closed in 1964, this line was spared, and it continued to be spared because it carried people to the ferry that traveled from Pembroke to Cork, in the Republic of Ireland, or "Error," as some Welshmen called it.

We pulled quietly into Pembroke. There were only seven of us on the train; it was not a ferry day. Pembroke seemed a very ordinary town, but it had a grand castle. Across the harbor was Milford Haven ("described by Lord Nelson as the best natural harbor in the world"), which was densely and blackly industrial, with its tanks and refineries and its oil-cracking plant. Why were the most prosperous places the ugliest?

I asked Mr. Peevey the stationmaster the way to Haverfordwest. It seemed there was no train that day, but there was a bus. As he explained where the bus stop was, his voice grew faint, and then he said, "Listen. What's that?"

He squinted across the railway platform and turned his head, inclining his ears and spreading out his fingers, listening in a tense sort of way.

"Yes," Mr. Peevey said after a moment. "Look."

I did not see anything. I had not heard anything. Mr. Peevey was smiling, and he looked at his watch—a stationmaster's instinctive reflex, I supposed. He nodded at the air.

Then I saw the specks, thousands of them, just above the ground, like a veil descending through the air. It made me slightly dizzy, their motion, their numbers—it was like seeing spots.

"Bugs," I said.

"Bees," Mr. Peevey said. "They're swarming."

They were darkly gathering, a large fuzzy gust of them approaching the platform.

Mr. Peevey was not worried. "My grandfather kept bees," he said calmly. "He could stir them around and get the honey and what-not. He never got stung. You get immune to bee stings. Most bee-keepers are immune."

"I suppose they could be dangerous?" I indicated the swarm.

"Kill you," Mr. Peevey said. "That's how dangerous."

He smiled again, marveling—as people do—at murderous Nature.

"If you start flaking around, look you, that lot will bite you." He giggled a little, in amazement rather than malice. "You could be stung to death!"

They were great Bible readers, these Welsh people, and I was sure he was thinking of the text O death, where is thy sting?

"I'd take the long way to the bus stop if I were you," Mr. Peevey said.

On the bus to Haverfordwest—the bus went slowly, and always down country lanes—I decided what it was that bothered me about the Welsh villages and towns. There was only one kind of cottage in the villages, and it was not a particularly pretty style; there was only one kind of terrace in the towns, and it was mournfully flat. They were one note, one color, one class, and in some places every house was identical, and equally ugly. This in itself was not remarkable—such towns had counterparts in the United States—but these Welsh ones were entirely surrounded by woods and hills and fields, and so they looked sullen, with faces averted from the green hills.

Some towns can be transformed and given a memorable character by a chance encounter. And then it is your secret—you alone were the witness. I had this experience in Haverfordwest. Three people stood in front of a fruit shop. An old woman was using sign language to speak—she was flapping her hands. A young woman was translating this sign language into spoken Welsh to an old man with a dog. The man replied to the gesticulating dumb woman in Welsh. It was all Welsh and flying hands, and finally the old man took out a beaded purse and squeezed it open. He removed a pound note that had been folded into the size of a postage stamp—he unfolded it (this was like origami) and handed it to the old woman. She thanked him in sign language: this was translated into Welsh. The man replied in Welsh. The woman kissed the pound note and went away with the younger woman.

I still lingered, wondering.

The old man jerked his dog's leash. He said, "Come on, Jasper!"

After all that, he spoke to his dog in English!

This incident colored my feelings for Haverfordwest much more than if I had spent my time scrutinizing the voided lozenges on the church crests or marching up to Wiston and reminiscing myself into a stupor over Wizo the Fleming.

From here to Fishguard the land was green and smooth, occasionally erupting into rocky heaps, like the great hill of boulders at Wolf's Castle. As I looked north from the village of Letterston, the rocky heaps in the distance seemed like fortresses and castle ruins. The Welsh landscape was the landscape of legend slightly out of focus, full of blurred castles and giants and dragons that were actually cliffs. The coast of Fishguard was like that, stonier and bleaker and more ragged than I had seen in South Pembrokeshire. The stonework on some cottages was as patchy and colorful as a quilted blanket.

It was twenty-eight miles from Fishguard to St. Dogmaels on the coastal path. I thought it would be a hard day's walk, but it took almost two, because of the steepness and the river detours. As I approached the end of it I met two fishermen, both named Jones, who told me with a kind of urgency that most nights they went out fishing for salmon, which they caught with nets slung out from coracles, and what did I think of that? I asked them how big the salmon were and what they got a pound. They were ten-pounders, worth two quid a pound.

These men directed me to a hotel in Cardigan, up the River Teifi, where they fished. Perhaps they did not like my face—it was a very bad hotel, and I had a very strange encounter there, and not just very strange, but...

But first I had to face Cardigan. Cardigan was poor, a place of high unemployment and hard-up people. The poverty was not immediately obvious; but with a growing sense of unease I began to notice that something was wrong. It was a frailty and uncertainty: things were very quiet—and then I studied the clothes, the houses, the food, the signs, the faces; and I saw that it was simple, they were poor.

"And the trouble with these depressed areas in Wales," a nationalist named Humphries told me, "is that they get a lot of cranks."

What did he mean by cranks?

"Food cranks, like," he said.

I said I inclined toward vegetarianism myself, and had even stopped smoking.

"And lesbians," he said, in a challenging way. "They paint pictures and have exhibitions in the Cardigan Town Hall."

I said that seemed fairly harmless.

"Pictures of"—he swallowed—"things I wouldn't mention."

I went to the town hall. It was an exhibition of feminist paintings—mainly scenes of childbirth done in a simple spattery way. The people running the exhibit were grave bearded men and cape-wearing women; they had an affected Gypsyish look, and were rather young. But I saw what Humphries meant by cranks: he meant English people.

Cardigan was Welsh-speaking Wales; so was North Pembrokeshire; so was the west coast, parts of Dyfedd and Gwynedd. The limits of Wales spoke Welsh. This was the Celtic fringe, spiritual home of the Plaid Cymru Party—the nationalists—and this was also where English-owned cottages were burned down. Sixty cottages had been put to the torch in the past three years.

I wondered whether the Welsh could be explained in terms of being bilingual, which is so often a form of schizophrenia, allowing a person to hold two contradictory opinions in his head at once, because the opinions remain untranslated. The Welsh had that mildly stunned and slaphappy personality that I associated with people for whom speaking two languages was a serious handicap. It made them profligate with language, it made them inexact, it had turned them into singers—well, that was no bad thing, they said. I did not think it was a question of good or bad, but only of a kind of confusion.

The Welsh stared in a friendly way. It could be disconcerting. The English never stared unless they were very angry (an English stare is like the Evil Eye) or wanted to score a debating point. The Welsh were like members of a family, but a large suspicious family. They certainly did have common characteristics, and they were more a nation than I had ever imagined. Sometimes it seemed to me that there was no such thing as English culture in a definable way. But Welshness was palpable; it was chattery and backward-looking. It surprised me that the Welsh had not burned down more cottages, the family feeling ran so strong.

"And they killed the commander," a court clerk named Davies told me, describing a Falklands' battle that had just been fought. Then Davies winced and said, "His name was Jones."

He let this sink in. He was moved by it. The Argies had killed one of their own Joneses! I had the feeling that if the soldier's name had been Brown, it would have made less of an impression.

And Marion Lewis at a public house in St. Dogmaels said, "They burn these cottages, the Plaid Cymru," and she smacked her lips. "Some of the chaps are very tough, you know. That's what I don't understand—there are still so many English cottages! The chaps do try, but they haven't "been successful."

She seemed a bit sorry there hadn't been more arson attacks.

I was bemused by the Welsh intonation. It was a whining, West Indian lilt, and it could be very soft and lisping, with slushy throat-clearings. It was full of interesting words. Some like toiledau and brecwyst —"toilet" and "breakfast"—did not appear to be ancient. And some were grunts, like the place names Plwmp and Mwnt. But corn was the Welsh for horn and was obviously from Latin, and so was cwn (dog) and bont (bridge), and the word for church was eglwys, the same word as the French église and with the same pronunciation. I wondered if it was my imagination that suggested that, given the whine and squeak, and the rising querying tone on most words, it was hard to express anger in Welsh. I wanted to see someone lose his temper in Welsh, but I never did.

***

My strange encounter took place at the Hotel Harlech, a dismal semiruin not far from the silted-up river. It had been closed for years, and it smelled that way—of mice and unwashed clothes. The smell of rags is like the smell of dead men anyway, but this was compounded with the smells of dirt and wood smoke and the slow river. I knew as soon as I checked in that it was a mistake. I was shown to my room by a sulking girl of fifteen, who had a fat pouty face and a potbelly.

"It seems a little quiet," I said.

Gwen said, "You're the only guest."

"In the whole hotel?"

"In the whole hotel."

My bed smelled, too, as though it had been slept in—just slept in recently, someone having crawled out a little while ago, leaving it warm and disgusting.

The owner of the Harlech was a winking woman with a husky laugh, named Reeny. She kept a purse in the cleavage between her breasts; she smoked while she was eating; she talked about her boyfriend—"My boyfriend's been all around the world on ships." Reeny's boyfriend was a pale unshaven man of fifty who limped through the hotel, his shirttails out, groaning because he could never find his hairbrush. His name was Lloyd, and he was balding. Lloyd seldom spoke to me, but Reeny was irrepressible, always urging me to come down to the bar for a drink.

The bar was a darkened room with torn curtains and a simple table in the center. There were usually two tattooed youths and two old men at the table, drinking beer with Lloyd. Reeny acted as barmaid, using a tin tray. And it was she who changed the records: the music was loud and terrible, but the men had no conversation, and they looked haggard and even rather ill.

The unexpected thing was that Reeny was very cheerful and hospitable. The hotel was dirty and her food unspeakable and the dining room smelled of urine, but Reeny was kind, and she loved to talk, and she spoke of improving the hotel, and she knew that Lloyd was a complaining old fake. Relax, enjoy yourself, have another helping, Reeny said. She had the right spirit, but the hotel was a mess. "This is Paul—he's from America," Reeny said, and winked at me. She was proud of me. That thought made me very gloomy.

One night she introduced me to Ellie. She was red-eyed and very fat and had a gravelly voice; she was somewhat toothless and freckled; she came from Swansea. "Aye," she said. "Swansea's a bloody bog." Ellie was drunk—and she was deaf in the way drunks often are. Reeny was talking about America, but Ellie was still mumbling about Swansea.

"At least we're not tight," Ellie said. "Aye, we're careful, but the Cardies are tight."

"That's us," Reeny said. "Cardies, from Cardigan. Aye, we're tighter than the Scots."

Ellie screwed up her face to show how tight the Cardies were, and then she demanded to know why I was not drunk—and she appealed to the silent haggard men, who stared back at her with dull damp eyes. Ellie was wearing a baggy gray sweater. She finished her pint of beer and then wiped her hands on her sweater.

"What do you think of the Cardies?" she said.

"Delightful," I said. But I thought: Savages.

At midnight they were still drinking.

"I'm going upstairs," I said.

"None of the rooms have locks," Reeny said. "That's why there are no keys. See?"

Ellie said, "Aarrgh, it's a quiet place, Reen!"

"Too bloody quiet, I say," Reeny said. "We have to drive to Saundersfoot for a little night life."

Saundersfoot was thirty-three miles away.

"What is it, Lloyd?" Reeny said.

Lloyd had been grinning.

He said, "He looks worried," meaning me.

"I'm not worried," I said.

This always sounds to me a worried man's protest. I stood there, trying to smile. The four local men at the table merely stared back with their haggard faces.

"There's no locks in this place," Lloyd said, with pleasure.

Then Reeny screeched, "We won't rob you or rape you!"

She said it so loudly that it was a few seconds before I could take it in. She was vivacious but ugly.

I recovered and said, "What a shame. I was looking forward to one or the other."

Reeny howled at this.

In the sour bed, I could hear rock music coming from the bar, and sometimes shouts. But I was so tired, I dropped off to sleep, and I dreamed of Cape Cod. I was with my cousin and saying to her, "Why do people go home so early? This is the only good place in the world. I suppose they're worried about traffic. I'd never leave—"

Then something tore. It was a ripping sound in the room. I sat up and saw a tousled head. I thought it was a man. It was a man's rough face, a squashed nose, a crooked mouth. I recognized the freckles and the red eyes. It was Ellie.

I said, "What are you doing?"

She was crouching so near to the bed that I could not see her body. The ripping sound came again—a zipper on my knapsack. Ellie was slightly turned away from me. She did not move. When I saw that it was Ellie and not a man, I relaxed—and I knew that my wallet and money were in my leather jacket, hanging on a hook across the room.

She said, "Where am I?"

"You're in my room."

She said, turning to me, "What are you doing here?"

"This is my room!"

Her questions had been drowsy in a theatrical way. She was still crouching near my knapsack. She was breathing hard.

I said, "Leave that thing alone."

"Aarrgh," she groaned, and plumped her knees against the floor.

I wanted her to go away.

I said, "I'm trying to sleep." Why was I being so polite?

She groaned again, a more convincing groan than the last one, and she said, "Where have I left me clothes?"

And she stood up. She was a big woman with big jolting breasts and freckles on them. She was, I saw, completely naked.

"Close your eyes," she said, and stepped closer.

I said, "It's five in the morning, for God's sake."

The sun had just struck the curtains.

"Aarrgh, I'm sick," she said. "Move over."

I said, "You don't have any clothes on."

"You can close your eyes," she said.

I said, "What were you doing to my knapsack?"

"Looking for me clothes," she said.

I said in a pleading way, "Give me a break, will you?"

"Don't look at me nakedness," she said.

"I'm going to close my eyes," I said, "and when I open them I don't want to see you in this room."

Her naked flesh went flap-flap like a rubber raincoat as she tramped across the hard floor. I heard her go—she pulled the door shut—and then I checked to see that my money was safe and my knapsack unviolated. The zippers were open, but nothing was gone. I remembered what Reeny had screamed at me: We won't rob you or rape you!

At breakfast, Reeny said, "I've not been up at this hour for ten year! Look, it's almost half-eight!"

Reeny had a miserable cough and her eyes were sooty with mascara. Her Welsh accent was stronger this morning, too.

I told her about Ellie.

She said, "Aye, is that so? I'll pull her leg about that! Aye, that is funny."

An old woman came to the door. She was unsteady, she peered in. Reeny asked her what she wanted. She said she wanted a pint of beer.

"It's half-eight in the morning!" Reeny said.

"A half a pint, then," the old woman said.

"And it's Sunday!" Reeny said. She turned to me and said, "We're dry on a Sunday around here. That's why it's so quiet. But you can get a drink at St. Dogmaels."

The woman looked pathetic. She said that in the coming referendum she would certainly vote for a change in the licensing law. She was not angry, but had that aged beaten look that passes for patience.

"Oh, heavens," Reeny said. "What shall I do, Paul? You tell me."

I said to the old woman, "Have a cup of tea."

"The police have been after me," Reeny said. "They're always looking in." Reeny walked to the cupboard. "I could lose my license." She took out a bottle of beer and poured it. "These coppers have no bloody mercy." The glass was full. "Forty-five pence," she said.

The woman drank that and then bought two more bottles. She paid and left, without another word. She had taken no pleasure in the drink and there was no satisfaction in having wheedled the beer out of Reeny on a dry day in Cardigan—in fact, she had not wheedled, but had merely stood there gaping in a paralyzed way.

I said, "It's a hell of a breakfast—a beer."

"She's an alcoholic," Reeny said. "She's thirty-seven. Doesn't look it, does she? Take me, I'm thirty-three and no one believes it. My boyfriend says I've got the figure of a girl of twenty. You're not going, are you?"

11. The 10:32 to Criccieth

THERE WAS no good coastal path north of Cardigan—all the farms and fields were jammed against the cliff edge—but by scaring cows and climbing stone walls, I managed a few miles. Then I came to Aberporth and could go no farther. For the next five miles or more it was an army rocket range—and the rockets were booming. The British were fighting a war, after all—"this Falklands business." Over two hundred and fifty men had died just the day before in the battle for a small sheep station at Goose Green. Most of the dead were Argentines, killed by British paratroopers in fury after word got out that a mock surrender with a white flag by an Argentine patrol had in fact been an ambush, never trust an argie! the headline in the Sun said. Was this why the rockets were exploding at Aberporth?

It was true that much of the British coast was empty and practically anybody's; yet the rest was impossible. Things that were dangerous (like nuclear power stations) or that stank (like sewage farms) were shoved onto the coast. They were safer that way and out of sight. The coast was regarded as a natural home for oil refineries and gas storage tanks, and there was more rubbish on the coast than in any inland dump. The coast was where you got rid of things: they were borne away and lost in the deep sinkhole of the sea. The coast had more than its fair share of parking lots and junkyards; and out of an ancient islanders' fear of invasion—of alien peoples plaguing her shores—the British had overfortified their coast with military installations, gun emplacements, and radar dishes of the sort I had seen in Dungeness and Kimmeridge. And as if that weren't enough, they also had American missile bases and squads of American Marines in various coves. These places looked as though they were expecting another onslaught of rapacious Danes or shield-biting berserkers. Of course, the coast was perfect for practicing with machine guns or even bombs and cannons. Traditionally, the sea was safe to shoot at. Here at Aberporth it was rockets, and the incautious walker risked being blown up or arrested as a spy.

I turned back and stumbled up the grassy hill to the coast road. The road was narrow and the speeding cars made it dangerous—just room enough for two lines of traffic. I had to lean against the nettles on the bank to let the cars pass. I walked to Synod Inn, and when I became bored with waiting for a bus, I hitched. With my knapsack and leather jacket and the Ordnance Survey Map in my hand, and needing a haircut, I looked like a hitchhiker—with a unhurried, money-saving, ready-for-anything expression. I got rides easily, with farmers who were going only a quarter of a mile, and with men making deliveries or heading for work. They usually said, "And how are you liking Wales?"

Emrys Morgan, a carpenter with a ripsaw in his back seat, said, "Aw, the Englishman is a very secretive man. His attitude is 'I look after myself, and God looks after all.'"

I remarked that the Welsh I had met were very polite.

"Very polite are the Welsh," Mr. Morgan said. "And much more polite than the English. We're different stock, with a different tradition. We're European Celts, and they're Saxons and Normans."

Huw Jones took me to Aberaeron in his old gray Singer Gazelle.

"This is where the Welsh left for Patagonia," he said.

"I've been there."

"Aberaeron?"

"Patagonia," I said.

Aberaeron was an unusually neat and orderly town of Nash terraces and plain brown houses, and on some streets there were lovely Georgian houses on the left and pebbledash Council houses on the right.

"Most people in Wales are Labour Party supporters, not Welsh Nationalists," another Jones told me. This Jones was a lawyer—a barrister. He said the Labour Party had a stranglehold on South Wales especially. "They could put a bloody donkey up for Parliament in South Wales, and if they said he was Labour he'd get in."

We were riding up to Aberystwyth. The coast here was very slopey—the green cliffs slanted down toward the sea. In the little bays and near villages there were always acres of orange tents and caravans.

"These people come down from Birmingham and the Midlands," the lawyer Jones said, "and they pitch their little tents. They look around and decide they like it. So they see a farmer. Has he got a cottage for sale? He probably does—farmers are having a very tough time, not enough work for their laborers. He sells the cottage. They're very cheap. It's a second home for these people. They just come and go as they please. Those are the people whose cottages are burned by the nationalists."

I said, "Wouldn't it be simpler to burn the tents?"

He laughed at this. So far, I had not met anyone in Wales who objected to the burning of English-owned cottages, and some people seemed to find it considerate and humane, since they were always burned when the owners were away.

Welshness was also a look of orderly clutter, and Aberystwyth typified it—houses everywhere, but always on streets; the cliffs obliterated with cottages, but tidy cottages; a canyon of flat-faced and barren buildings on the seafront, but green mountains just behind. I stayed in a guest house, Eluned Williams, Prop. "You're not going?" she would say each morning after breakfast. Business was bad. But I wasn't going. I was doing my laundry. I was off to the beach ("well adapted for bathing, and yields cornelians, agates, and other pebbles") to look at the tar-stained stones. I was browsing and sometimes buying in the antique shops—I bought an old walking stick that had a tiger's tooth for a handle. I was looking at the bookstores—the University College of Wales gave Aberystwyth its studious air, but the Act of Parliament (1967) had made Welsh equal in importance to English, which meant that every municipal and university meeting was twice as long, since it was conducted in both languages. One day there was a Peace March in Aberystwyth. There were signs in Chinese characters, and Buddhist monks, and adults and children, protesting the building of a nuclear installation in Wales at Brawdy. "Join us," a man said to me. I was wearing my knapsack. I shook my head. "Can't," I said. "I'm an alien." That was the day I was doing my laundry. I was in my bathing suit, and every other article of clothing I owned was in my knapsack, to be washed.

I took the narrow-gauge railway to the Devil's Bridge, through the Rheidol Valley and the deep gorge of the Mynach. It was a toy train, and full of pipe-stuffing railway buffs and day-trippers. And there were rowdies, boys "in care," I was told, abandoned by their parents, patronized by the state; they were pale tattooed thirteen-year-olds smoking cigarettes and saying, "It's fulla fucken trees," where William Wordsworth in another mood had written,

There I seem to stand,

As in life's morn; permitted to behold

From the dread chasm, woods climbing above woods,

In pomp that fades not; everlasting snows;

And skies that ne'er relinquish their repose...

And there were parents, too. I treasured their angry remarks.

"Oh, God, Roger, can't you see he's just desperately tired!"

The child in question was spitting and kicking and crying, a furious little weevil who did not know where he was and perhaps thought, in his animal way, that he was going to die here.

And one mother, looking at the tormented face of her wet baby, grew very cold and sarcastic.

"Someone's going to have a warm bottom in a minute!" she said.

The baby groaned like a starving monkey and tensed its fingers, indicating fear and frustration.

The Welsh people on the train stared at this behavior and thought: The English!

***

Ever since Tenby I had noticed an alteration in the light, a softness and a clarity that came from a higher sky. It must have been the Atlantic—certainly I had the impression of an ocean of light, and it was not the harsh daytime sun of the tropics or the usual grayness of the industrialized temperate zone; daylight in England often lay dustily overhead like a shroud. The cool light in West Wales came steadily from every direction except from the sun. It was especially strong as a force rising out of the distance and reaching earth again in a purer way as a reflection from the sky. The sunsets in Aberystwyth were vast, full of battle flames, never seeming to move and yet always in motion. It was a severe shore, and those houses looked harsh, but the Welsh light—the immense cold mirror of the Atlantic—made it gleam, and made its sadness visible.

One evening strolling on the Front at Aberystwyth I remembered that, just a year before, I had stopped smoking my pipe. I had not had a smoke of anything for a year. To celebrate, I bought a cigar, but Mrs. Williams wouldn't let me smoke it at her house ("No one has ever smoked at Y Wyddfa"—it was the name of her house—"and I don't think I could stand it if they did"), so I took it out to the Front and set it on fire and smoked it until there was only an inch of a butt left, which I chucked into Cardigan Bay.

***

I took a tiny two-coach branch-line train out of Aberystwyth, up the west side of the Rheidol Valley, and around the bushy hills. The countryside here was tumbledown and beautiful. Dolybont was an old village of rough stone cottages and a squat church and thick hedges, and with his head out of his bedroom window a white-haired man was reprimanding his dog in Welsh.

The train climbed and paused. There were fifteen of us on it, and two got off. Then it picked up speed on a slope, and soon it was racing out of the hills, doing sixty or more, quite a speed for a little country railway train with squeaky wheels. We went on, tearing past the buttercups. We entered the plain that lay between the sea and the mountains, and on the plain's edge was the small seaside town of Borth, a straggling beachfront with the shadow of the Cambrian Mountains behind it. We swung east at the lip of the River Dovey, past Taliesin ("the grave of the Welsh Homer ... Taliesin, the greatest of the bards, Sixth Century...") and then along the riverbank. Aberdovey was under the hills at the far side of the estuary; this whole place was wonderful—the river valley about two miles wide and a great deal of it flat grassy marsh in which sheep were grazing, and the valley sides were gray hills and mountains.

It was muddy and majestic all the way to Dovey Junction, where the river and the valley were shrunken. Because of its steady level progress, a train was the perfect way to see a landscape—it was impossible to be closer to the ground. And it was an excitement to travel up a contracting valley, from the broad river mouth to the creek at its narrow throat—it was like being swallowed.

We came to Machynlleth ("believed to be the Roman Maglona"), where I saw a sign advertising the Centre for Alternative Technology. I asked directions and was told it was three to four miles up the road. I walked there through the woods and found it at Llwyngwern, at the southern edge of Snowdonia National Park, in an abandoned slate quarry. It was a settlement on a hillside and at first sight seemed no more than a jumble of ridiculous windmills and hand-cranked contraptions set among cabins and flapping plastic. The flapping plastic was part of the solar power units, but it was a dull day and no solar power was being generated. Here and there were signposts with homilies on little placards. I copied one into my notebook: "Waste is really a human concept, for in nature nothing is wasted—everything is part of a continuous cycle."

The Centre for Alternative Technology was an elaborate and messy reproach to middle-class tidiness, a kind of museum of compost heaps and enormous and unfamiliar-looking toilets. There were buckets everywhere. Nothing was thrown away, and it was boasted that shit could be turned into valuable gas, and eggshells into rich humus, and this tin funnel labeled "Pee Can" was for collecting urine, "another valuable fertilizer."

All of this was true, and there was a great deal of earnest work being done at the Centre to make it monumental, the apotheosis of a dunghill. Their gardens flourished. They made bran cookies and sprout salad and chunky vegetable soup, and their children had rosy cheeks. Wales was said to be full of communes like this, but the Centre charged admission and offered bed and breakfast. It was a happy-looking place, and if it seemed a trifle preoccupied with waste matter and a little passionate on the subject of bowel movements, it could be explained in terms of Welsh culture, in which both evangelism and toilet training figured fairly strongly. In any case, I was treated with hospitality by the Alternative Technologists. They regarded my knapsack as an indicator that I was one of them, deep down—and having seen what the old technology had done to South Wales, I think I was. Any alternative was better than the nuclear reactors on the coast, even the odd designs they were advocating, the harmless energy of solar panels and the superior, multipurpose shithouse.

I walked back to Machynlleth. A grouchy guard at the station, Willy Bevan, said he didn't bloody know which was the next bloody train to Barmouth. He consulted his timetable.

"Two-thirteen. But there's an 'E' on it. What does that bloody mean?"

He checked the footnote.

"Not on Sundays," he said. "Today's bloody Friday."

He consulted the timetable again.

"And one at two-forty-eight. But there's an 'A' on it. What does that bloody mean?"

He checked that footnote.

"Saturdays only," he said. "So the next bloody train—"

I went down the line in a small train to Dovey Junction and I continued on a second train to Barmouth. The junction was in the middle of the river valley, just a halt in a marsh, but the other train was waiting for this one as we drew in. The remote branch lines of Wales were run with efficiency and pride. The services were frequent, even here, and I could easily have crossed the line and taken a train to Shrewsbury and been in London in time for dinner.

The train traveled seaward along the north bank of the river, and then westerly into the glare of the afternoon sun skipping through the marsh. Tracking around a hillside on a ledge, the train swung away from the wide estuary of the Dovey, and its shore of sand and broken slate, and then north to Aberdovey—houses on the steep hillside, tin caravans on the beach.

Caravans—it soon became obvious—were the curse of the Welsh coast. They were technically mobile homes, but they were not mobile. At best they were tin boxes, the shape of shoe boxes—including the lids—anchored in a field next to the sea, fifty or a hundred at a time, in various faded colors. Sometimes they were plunked down on slabs of concrete, and where there were more than a hundred—I counted over three hundred in some places—there was a fish-and-chip shop and a tin shower and another tin outhouse with a sign saying conveniences. What fresh water there was came from a standpipe surrounded by squashy mud. The whole affair put me in mind of nomads or refugees, certain Afghans or Somalis or Kurds, or the dizziest Gypsies who had perhaps made a little money but refused to abandon their old ways, sending their womenfolk out for buckets of water. You wondered how they could stand it so close to each other in such tiny unsheltered quarters, and you also began to ask the questions that true savages inspired—not the civilized Afghans or Somalis, but those people in remote parts who looked so naked and uncomfortable, you wondered how they washed and ate and kept dry and did their business. And there was something totally savage in the way they did not notice the incongruity of the settlement, how ugly it was, how beautiful the beach. The caravan settlements were always hideous and always in the loveliest coves.

They were English people, of course, encouraged by the Welsh to have a cheap holiday here. Some lived in orange tents at the margins of the caravan fields. It was always a lurid sight on a hot day, the pink people reading the Sun in front of the orange tents, making cups of tea on little flaming tin stoves.

It was like the nuclear power stations and the junkyards and the shallys and sewage farms: you could do anything you liked on the British coast, beside the uncomplaining sea. The seaside belonged to everyone.

After Tywyn and more caravan camps, the train climbed to open cliffs and traveled through rocky sheep pastures, and then near Fair-bourne passed the foot of Cader Idris ("the chair of the giant Idris"), a high ridge with a three-thousand-foot peak, which was one of the most beautifully shaped mountains in England. Then across the bar of the Mawddach estuary, with the watering place of Barmouth lying under a hill. The river was wide and purple-blue in the lowering sun, with flat sandy banks rising to steep hillsides and more mountains. Barmouth looked to be a place of great refreshment, but closer it was excruciating, much too small to contain the mobs, not enough parking lots or sidewalks. The sunburned people were milling around, and—unusual on the coast—the train cut right through the middle of town; everything was halted and tangled while the train made its stop, and Barmouth was suddenly full of pedestrians impatient to cross the line.

I had thought of getting off at Barmouth, but I changed my mind when I saw the numbers of people—in fact, I did get off, but I hurried back on, not wanting to be duffilled. And I had another reason: there was a note in the Cambrian Coast Railway Timetable that said, under certain asterisked stations, Calls on request. Passengers wishing to alight must inform the guard, and those wishing to join must give a hand signal to the driver.

I decided on Llandanwg. I told the guard I wished to alight there. We continued along the coast, passing four or five tiny platforms, and then the train stopped at Llandanwg, for me alone. Llandanwg was lovely, which was why it was full of ugly caravans. I walked to Harlech.

Welsh mountains looked like mountains, and its cottages like cottages, and its castles like castles. Harlech Castle was the very image of the gray mass of round towers high on a sea cliff that children dream about after a bedtime story of kings and princesses and dragons. But I kept my vow against entering castles or cathedrals, and instead walked through the Royal St. Davids golf course to the dunes and examined the caravans and tents. I did not really hate them. I was fascinated by them, as I had been by the shallys on the English coast. I made notes about the furnishings (camp cots, folding tables, transistor radios playing loud music) and about the food (tea, cookies, soup, bread, beans). The people in these encampments were great readers of the gutter press—lots of cheap newspapers were in evidence.

Tony Henshaw had been a policeman in Liverpool for five years—Constable Henshaw, people called him—and he had thought of making a career of it. "But last year finished it for me," he said.

He was rather cautious with me at first. He claimed that being a policeman in Liverpool was like anything else. But I knew it was not—or else why had he come to Harlech in his caravan, intending to spend the rest of his life here, and him not even being Welsh?

"It's rather a foony business," Mr. Henshaw said, looking around policeman's fashion, no sudden movements.

"Funny in what way?" I asked.

"I was in Toxteth last soomer."

"You mean the riots?"

"Riots and fighting, like. It woosn't easy. They was kids everywhere in the streets. Everywhere you looked, kids. All of them fighting. The fighting was bad. It was very bad." He became silent.

I stared and waited, expecting more.

"I can tell you I was scared."

I said in a patronizing way, "That's nothing to be ashamed of. You could have been killed."

"I could have been killed," he said gratefully.

Then he said, "You actually feel sorry for soom of them. They have no chance, no chance at all. It's 'awpless, really. The kids, small kids, all in tatters. It's sad."

"So you quit?"

"I was dead scared," he said. "But the situation hasn't changed. I think of them sometimes—all in tatters."

***

The next day, without thinking. I walked out of Harlech, past the castle, and down the road to Tygwyn. It was about a mile. And then I remembered the train; but now I could see whether flagging it down—giving a hand signal, as the timetable said—actually worked. I waited, and at about ten-thirty I heard the train whistle. I stuck my hand out. The train stopped for me. I got on and rode up the coast. It was the 10:32 to Criccieth.

We came to a long tidal estuary, and I saw across the water a dome, a church spire, a campanile, some pink and blue cottages, and some fake ruins: Portmeirion. It was a fantasy village, a large expensive folly, built by Sir Clough Williams-Ellis (1883–1978), a Welsh architect. Inspired by Portofino and liking this part of the Welsh coast, he created this village from scratch—the colors and shapes were not at all Welsh, and it looked unusual even from two miles away on a moving train. But it was a steamy day, and soon Portmeirion disappeared into the heat haze.

In Penrhyndeudraeth, the next stop, there was a large explosives factory. The local people called it Cooks, after the former owners, but its correct name was the Nobel Explosives Factory, a horrible conglomeration of vats, tubes, metal elbows, and wired-up pipes, arranged on the hillside like an enormous homemade whiskey still, and surrounded by prison fences and barbed wire. The interesting thing to me was not that this ugly explosives factory was in a pretty village, or that this grubby dangerous business gave us the Nobel Peace Prize—it was rather that for fifteen years in that same village of Penrhyndeudraeth, with this dynamite under him, lived Bertrand Russell, the pacifist.

Eight more miles on this sunny day and we drew into Criccieth, where I hopped out of the train. I owned a guidebook that said, "Criccieth: For several years this small town was the home of James (now Jan) Morris, probably the finest living British travel writer." The "James (now Jan)" needed no explanation, since the story of how she changed from a man to a woman in a clinic in Casablanca was told in her book Conundrum, 1974. She still lived near Criccieth, outside the village of Llanystumdwy, in what was formerly the stables of the manor house, looking northward to the mountains of Eryri and southward to Cardigan Bay.

I seldom looked people up in foreign countries—I could never believe they really wanted to see me; I had an uncomfortable sense that I was interrupting something intimate—but I did look up Jan Morris. She had written a great deal about Wales, and I was here, and I knew her vaguely. Her house was built like an Inca fort, of large black rocks and heavy beams. She had written, "It is built in the old Welsh way, with rough gigantic stones, piled one upon the other in an almost natural mass, with a white wooden cupola on top. Its architecture is of the variety known these days as 'vernacular,' meaning that no professional architect has ever had a hand in it."

She was wearing a straw calypso hat tipped back on her bushy hair, and a knit jersey, and white slacks. It was a very hot day and she was dressed for it. There is a certain educated English voice that is both correct and malicious. Jan Morris has such a voice. It was not deep but it was languid, and the maleness that still trembled in it made it sultry and attractive. There was nothing ponderous about her. She shrugged easily and was a good listener, and she laughed as a cat might—full-throated and with a little hiss of pleasure, stiffening her body. She was kind, reckless, and intelligent.

Her house was very neat and full of books and pictures. "I have filled it with Cymreictod —Welshness." Yes, solid country artifacts and beamed ceilings and a no smoking sign in Welsh—she did not allow smoking in the house. Her library was forty-two feet long and the corresponding room upstairs was her study, with a desk and a stereo.

Music mattered to her in an unusual way. She once wrote, "Ani-mists believe that the divine is to be found in every living thing, but I go one further; I am an inanimist, holding that even lifeless objects can contain immortal yearnings ... I maintain, for instance, that music can permanently influence a building, so I often leave the record player on when I am out of the house, allowing its themes and melodies to soak themselves into the fabric."

Perhaps she was serious. Inanimate objects can seem to possess something resembling vitality, or a mood that answers your own. But melodies soaking into wood and stone? "My kitchen adores Mozart," the wise-guy might say, or, "The parlor's into Gladys Knight and the Pips." But I did not say anything; I just listened approvingly.

"I suppose it's very selfish, only one bedroom," she said.

But it was the sort of house everyone wanted, on its own, at the edge of a meadow, solid as could be, well-lighted, pretty, painted, cozy, with an enormous library and study and a four-poster: perfect for a solitary person and one cat. Hers was called Solomon.

Then she said, "Want to see my grave?"

I said of course and we went down to a cool shaded woods by a riverside. Jan Morris was a nimble walker: she had climbed to twenty thousand feet with the first successful Everest expedition in 1953. Welsh woods were full of small twisted oaks and tangled boughs and moist soil and dark ferny corners. We entered a boggier area of straight green trees and speckled shade.

"I always think this is very Japanese," she said.

It did look that way, the idealized bushy landscape of the woodblock print, the little riverside grotto.

She pointed across the river and said, "That's my grave—right there, that little island."

It was like a beaver's dam of tree trunks padded all around with moss, and more ferns, and the river slurping and gurgling among boulders.

"There's where I'm going to be buried—or rather scattered. It's nice, don't you think? Elizabeth's ashes are going to be scattered there, too." Jan Morris was married to Elizabeth before the sex change.

It seemed odd that someone so young should be thinking of death. She was fifty-six, and the hormones she took made her look a great deal younger—early forties, perhaps. But it was a very Welsh thought, this plan for ashes and a gravesite. It was a nation habituated to ghostliness and sighing and mourning. I was traveling on the Celtic fringe, where they still believed in giants.

What did I think of her grave? she asked.

I said the island looked as though it would wash away in a torrent and that her ashes would end up in Cardigan Bay. She laughed and said it did not matter.

At our first meeting about a year before, in London, she had said suddenly, "I am thinking of taking up a life of crime," and she had mentioned wanting to steal something from Woolworth's. It had not seemed so criminal to me, but over lunch I asked her whether she had done anything about it.

"If I had taken up a life of crime I would be hardly likely to tell you, Paul!"

"I was just curious," I said.

She said, "These knives and forks. I stole them from Pan-American Airways. I told the stewardess I was stealing them. She said she didn't care."

They were the sort of knives and forks you get on an airplane with your little plastic tray of soggy meat and gravy.

Talk of crime led us to talk of arson by Welsh nationalists. I asked why only cottages were burned, when there were many tin caravans on the coast that would make a useful blaze. She said her son was very pro-Welsh and patriotic and would probably consider that.

I said that the Welsh seemed like one family.

"Oh, yes, that's what my son says. He thinks as long as he is in Wales he's safe. He'll always be taken care of. He can go to any house and he will be taken in and fed and given a place to sleep."

"Like the travelers in Arabia who walk up to a Bedouin's tent and say, 'I am a guest of God' in order to get hospitality. Ana dheef Allah."

"Yes," she said. "It's probably true—it is like a family here in Wales."

And like all families, I said, sentimental and suspicious and quarrelsome and secretive. But Welsh nationalism was at times like a certain kind of feminism, very monotonous and one-sided.

She said, "I suppose it does look that way, if you're a man."

I could have said: Didn't it look that way to you when you were a man?

She said, "As for the caravans and tents, yes, they look awful. But the Welsh don't notice them particularly. They are not noted for their visual sense. And those people, the tourists, are seeing Wales. I'm glad they're here, in a way, so they can see this beautiful country and understand the Welsh."

Given the horror of the caravans, it was a very generous thought, and it certainly was not my sentiment. I always thought of Edmund Gosse saying, "No one will see again on the shore of England what I saw in my early childhood." The shore was fragile and breakable and easily poisoned.

Jan Morris was still speaking of the Welsh. "Some people say that Welsh nationalism is a narrow movement, cutting Wales off from the world. But it is possible to see it as liberating Wales and giving it an importance—of bringing it into the world."

We finished lunch and went outside. She said, "If only you could see the mountains. I know it's boring when people say that—but they really are spectacular. What do you want to do?"

I said that I had had a glimpse of Portmeirion from the train and wanted a closer look, if there was time.

We drove there in her car and parked under the pines. She had known the architect Clough Williams-Ellis very well. "He was a wonderful man," she said. "On his deathbed he was still chirping away merrily. But he was very worried about what people would say about him. Funny man! He wrote his own obituary! He had it there with him as he lay dying. When I visited him, he asked me to read it. Of course, there was nothing unflattering in it. I asked him why he had gone to all the trouble of writing his own obituary.

"He said, 'Because I don't know what the Times will write in the obituary they do of me.'"

We walked through the gateway and down the stairs to the little Italian fantasy town on this Welsh hillside.

"He was obsessed that they would get something wrong or be critical. He had tried every way he could of getting hold of his Times obituary—but failed, of course. They're always secret."

She laughed. It was that hearty malicious laugh.

"The funny thing was, I was the one who had written his obituary for the Times. They're all written carefully beforehand, you know."

I said, "And you didn't tell him?"

"No." Her face was blank. Was she smiling behind it? "Do you think I should have?"

I said, "But he was on his deathbed."

She laughed again. She said, "It doesn't matter."

There was a sculpted bust of Williams-Ellis in a niche, and resting crookedly on its dome was a hand-scrawled sign saying, the bar UPSTAIRS IS OPEN.

Jan said, "He would have liked that."

We walked through the place, under arches, through gateways, past Siamese statuary and Greek columns and gardens and pillars and colonnades; we walked around the piazza.

"The trouble with him was that he didn't know when to stop."

It was a sunny day. We lingered at the blue Parthenon, the Chantry, the Hercules statue, the town hall. You think: What is it doing here? More cottages.

"Once, when we lost a child, we stayed up there in that white cottage." She meant herself and Elizabeth, when they were husband and wife.

There was more. Another triumphal arch, the Prior's Lodge, pink and green walls.

Jan said, "It's supposed to make you laugh."

But instead, it was making me very serious, for this folly had taken over forty years to put together, and yet it still had the look of a faded movie set.

"He even designed the cracks and planned where the mossy parts should be. He was very meticulous and very flamboyant, too, always in one of these big, wide-brimmed antediluvian hats and yellow socks."

I was relieved to get out of Portmeirion; I had been feeling guilty, with the uncomfortable suspicion that I had been sightseeing—something I had vowed I would not do.

Jan said, "Want to see my gravestone?"

It was the same sudden, proud, provocative, mirthful way that she had said, Want to see my grave?

I said of course.

The stone was propped against the wall of her library. I had missed it before. The lettering was very well done, as graceful as the engraving on a bank note. Tt was inscribed Jan & Elizabeth Morris. In Welsh and English, above and below the names, it said,

Here Are Two Friends

At the End of One Life

I said it was as touching as Emily Dickinson's gravestone in Amherst, Massachusetts, which said nothing more than Called Back.

When I left, and we stood at the railway station at Porthmadog, Jan said, "If only these people knew who was getting on the train!"

I said, "Why should they care?"

She grinned. She said, "That knapsack—is that all you have?"

I said yes. We talked about traveling light. I said the great thing was to have no more than you could carry comfortably and never to carry formal clothes—suits, ties, shiny shoes, extra sweaters: what sort of travel was that?

Jan Morris said, "I just carry a few frocks. I squash them into a ball—they don't weigh anything. It's much easier for a woman to travel light than a man."

There was no question that she knew what she was talking about, for she had been both a man and a woman. She smiled at me, looking like Tootsie, and I felt a queer thrill when I kissed her goodbye.

12. The 20:20 to Llandudno Junction

"I LOVE STEAM, don't you?" Stan Wigbeth said to me on the Ffestiniog Railway, and then he leaned out the window. He was not interested in my answer, which was "Up to a point." Mr. Wigbeth smiled and ground his teeth in pleasure when the whistle blew. He said there was nothing to him more beautiful than a steam "loco." He told me they were efficient and brilliantly made; but engine drivers had described to me how uncomfortable they could be, and how horrible on winter nights, because it was impossible to drive most steam engines without sticking your face out the side window every few minutes.

I wanted Mr. Wigbeth to admit that they were outdated and ox-like, dramatic-looking but hell to drive; they were the choo-choo fantasies of lonely children; they were fun but filthy. Our train was pulled through the Welsh mountains by a Fairlie, known to the buffs as a "double engine"—two boilers—"the most uncomfortable engine I've ever driven," a railwayman once told me. It was very hot for the driver, because of the position of the boilers. The footplate of the Fairlie was like an Oriental oven for poaching ducks in their own sweat. Mr. Wigbeth did not agree with any of this. Like many other railway buffs, he detested our century.

This had originally been a tram line, he told me; all the way from Porthmadog to Blaenau Ffestiniog—horse trams, hauling slate from the mountain quarries. Then it was named the Narrow Gauge Railway and opened to passengers in 1869. It was closed in 1946 and eventually reopened in stages. The line was now—this month—completely open.

"We're lucky to be here," Mr. Wigbeth said, and checked his watch—a pocket watch, of course: the railway buffs timepiece. He was delighted by what he saw. "Right on time!"

It was a beautiful trip to Blaenau, on the hairpin curves of the steep Snowdonia hills and through the thick evening green of the Dwyryd Valley. To the southeast, amid the lovely mountains, was the Trawsfynydd Nuclear Power Station, three or four gigantic gray slabs. An English architect, noted for his restrained taste, had been hired in 1959 to make it prettier, or at least bearable, but he had failed. Perhaps he should have planted vines. Yet this monstrosity emphasized the glory of these valleys. I found the ride restful, even with the talkative Mr. Wigbeth beside me. Then he was silenced by a mile-long tunnel. The light at the end of the tunnel was Blaenau Ffestiniog, at the head of the valley.

"Where are you off to, then?" Mr. Wigbeth asked.

"I'm catching the next train to Llandudno Junction."

"It's a diesel," he said, and made a sour face.

"So what?"

"I don't call that a train," he said. "I call that a tin box!"

He was disgusted and angry. He put on his engine driver's cap and his jacket with the railway lapel pins, and after a last look at his conductor-type pocket watch, he got into his little Ford Cortina and drove twenty-seven stop-and-go miles back to Bangor.

I walked around Blaenau. I had thought of spending the night there, but it seemed a dull place and I felt negligent, being away from the coast. It was still like a bright afternoon when I took the 20:20 to Llandudno Junction, but moments after leaving Blaenau Station we plunged into a tunnel two miles long. When we emerged I began looking for the peak of Snowdon on the west, and imagined that I saw it at Dolwyddelan. The castle ("In 1281 Llewelyn the Last was here...") was solitary and high and looked like a bad molar. At Bettws-y-Coed I searched for Ugly House ("once an overnight stop for Irish drovers"), but could not see it. The village was pretty but overcrowded this hot evening, and I had a happy, hooky-playing feeling as I left on the empty train rolling north through the Vale of Conway, stopping at Llanrwst and Dolgarrog. Now the light was golden, and the motion of the little train lulled me as we traveled along the river under the peaceful hills to the coast.

***

I was not frightened at the hotel in Llandudno until I was taken upstairs by the pockmarked clerk; and then I sat in the dusty room alone and listened. The only sound was my breathing, from having climbed the four flights of stairs. The room was small; there were no lights in the passageway; the wallpaper had rust stains that could have been spatters of blood. The ceiling was high, the room narrow: it was like sitting at the bottom of a well. I went downstairs.

The clerk was watching television in the lounge—he called it a lounge. He did not speak to me. He was watching "Hill Street Blues," a car chase, some shouting. I looked at the register and saw what I had missed before—that I was the only guest in this big dark forty-room hotel. I went outside and wondered how to escape. Of course I could have marched in and said, "I'm not happy here—I'm checking out," but the clerk might have made trouble and charged me. Anyway, I wanted to punish him for running such a scary place.

I walked inside and upstairs, grabbed my knapsack, and hurried to the lounge, rehearsing a story that began, "This is my bird-watching gear. I'll be right back—" The clerk was still watching television. As I passed him (he did not look up), the hotel seemed to me the most sinister building I had ever been in. On my way downstairs I had had a moment of panic when, faced by three closed doors in a hallway, I imagined myself in one of those corridor labyrinths of the hotel in the nightmare, endlessly tramping torn carpets and opening doors to discover again and again that I was trapped.

I ran down the Promenade to the bandstand and stood panting while the band played "If You Were the Only Girl in the World." I wondered if I had been followed by the clerk. I paid twenty pence for a deck chair, but feeling that I was being watched (perhaps it was my knapsack and oily shoes?), I abandoned the chair and continued down the Promenade. Later, I checked into the Queens Hotel, which looked vulgar enough to be safe.

Llandudno was the sort of place that inspired old-fashioned fears of seaside crime. It made me think of poisoning and suffocation, screams behind varnished doors, creatures scratching at the wainscoting. I imagined constantly that I was hearing the gasps of adulterers from the dark windows of those stuccoed terraces that served as guest houses—naked people saying gloatingly, "We shouldn't be doing this!" In all ways, Llandudno was a perfectly preserved Victorian town. It was so splendid-looking that it took me several days to find out that it was in fact very dull.

It had begun as a fashionable watering place and developed into a railway resort. It was still a railway resort, full of people strolling on the Promenade and under the glass and iron canopies of the shopfronts on Mostyn Street. It had a very old steamer ("Excursions to the Isle of Man") moored at its pier head, and very old hotels, and a choice of very old entertainments— Old Mother Riley at the Pavilion, the Welsh National Opera at the Astra Theatre doing Tosca, or Yorkshire comedians in vast saloon bars telling very old jokes. "We're going to have a loovely boom competition," a toothy comedian was telling his drunken audience in a public house near Happy Valley. A man was blindfolded and five girls selected, and the man had to judge—by touching them—which one's bum was the shapeliest. It caused hilarity and howls of laughter; the girls were shy—one simply walked offstage; and at one point some men were substituted and the blindfolded man crouched and began searching the men's bums as everyone jeered. And then the girl with the best bum was selected as the winner and awarded a bottle of carbonated cider called Pomagne.

I overheard two elderly ladies outside at the rail, looking above Llandudno Bay. They were Miss Maltby and Miss Thorn, from Glossop, near Manchester.

"It's a nice moon," Miss Maltby said.

"Aye," Miss Thorn said. "It is."

"But that's not what we saw earlier this evening."

"No. That was the sun."

Miss Maltby said, "You told me it was the moon."

"It was all that mist, you see," Miss Thorn said. "But I know now it was the sun."

The town was dominated by two silver-gray headlands of swollen limestone, Great and Little Orme. From Llandudno's pier head on a clear day it was possible to see the Lancashire coast, and from West Parade on the other side (where Lewis Carroll stayed with the Liddell family and wrote part of Alice), Bangor and the shore of Anglesey were greenishly apparent across Conway Bay.

***

There were two Indians in my railway compartment, trying to open a briefcase. It had a combination lock, and they had the combination, but still they could not open it. They quarreled a little, taking turns sighing at the stubborn lock, and then one said, "You would be so kind?" I took the briefcase into my lap and spanked it and it popped open. It contained some combs, a bottle of hair oil, a blue diary, a Bengali movie magazine, and a plastic pouch that was zippered shut. While one Indian removed a comb from the briefcase, the other Indian picked up a valise and left the train, muttering.

The remaining Indian combed his hair and said he had never seen the muttering one before in his life. They had met over the briefcase.

This Indian, Mr. Amin, said, "I am in catering business." He smiled and added, "That is to say, catering and restaurantooring."

He owned a curry shop in Bangor.

"I like Bangor and I am liking Vales," he said. "And the Vellish I am speaking as vell."

"Say something in Welsh," I suggested.

"I can say some few words for you," Mr. Amin said. "You are helping me with my briefcase and making me so happy. I am thinking, and that other man, too, perhaps ve are not unlocking my case! And—vhat you vanted?"

"Welsh," I said.

He straightened his head and in a clacking voice said, "Bore da. Good marning. Croeso. Velcome. Diolch yn fawr. Oh, thank you very much. Nos da. Good evening. Cymru am byth. Vales forever."

I said, "Are you going to stay in Bangor forever?"

"Who knows about forever?"

"Let's say five years."

He said, "Yes."

"How many Bangladeshis are there in Bangor?"

"Not more than eight."

"Do you have a mosque?"

"No," he said. "But sometimes ve use a certain floor in the Student Union building."

"Do you have a mullah?"

He said, "Ven five or six pray, vun can be mullah."

I asked, "How many children do you have?"

"Questions! Questions!" He seemed short of breath; his face was a tight fit; he probably took me for the tax man.

"Sorry, Mr. Amin. I have two children. Boys."

He relaxed and looked envious. "You are lucky. I have three girls, and then I try again, and then I just get a boy last year."

We entered a tunnel—silence—and then emerged, and Bangor lay before us, big and gray. Mr. Amin gathered his briefcase and paper bags and made ready to get off the train.

I said, "You could have settled anywhere in Britain, Mr. Amin. Why did you choose to settle in Bangor?"

He said, "Because it reminds me of my town in Bangladesh. Bangor is just very like Sylhet."

Was Sylhet severe and monotonous like this? Perhaps so. In any case, Indians had often told me how Cheltenham reminded them of certain towns in the Punjab, and Scotland was reminiscent of Simla, and after the Sultan of Zanzibar was overthrown he took himself to Eastbourne, claiming that it somewhat resembled his fragrant but decrepit sultanate in the Indian Ocean.

I stayed on the train and crossed the Menai Strait to Anglesey. The island was flat, as if it had detached itself from the mainland and become waterlogged. Its meadows were no more than gentle swells, and small houses and broken cottages lay scattered at great distances. It possessed the haunted look that Cornwall had, its rocks like ruins, its stillness like suspense. It had been the Druids' last outpost, and it looked it. In such a flat grassy place it was possible to see that there was nothing threatening, and yet this apparent openness was itself eerie and suggested invisible dangers. It was the sound of the wind, the pale light, the flat shadows on the low ground.

The first station was the famous but unsayable Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch ("St. Mary's Church in a hollow by the white hazel close to the rapid whirlpool by the red cave of St. Tysilio"). It is usually called Llanfair P.G., but the full name appeared on the station signboard, which was fifteen feet long. There was nothing else of interest at the station or in the town, and indeed it was indistinguishable from the other twenty-two places called Llanfair (St. Mary's) in Wales. I was told that the long name had been concocted by the village tailor a century ago so that the place would seem singular, much as Cross Keys, Pennsylvania, had been officially renamed Intercourse.

The stations and villages along the route to Holyhead looked worn down and depressing. It was as if all the millions of lonely Irish people who traveled this way—this was the principal route to Ireland—had devoured the landscape with their eyes, looked upon it with such hunger that there was little of it left to take hold of and examine. It sometimes seemed that way to me in Britain, in the busiest places, as if a castle's ramparts or a hillside or a village—supposedly so picturesque—had been eroded by two thousand years of admiring scrutiny, the penetration of people's eyes. No wonder they now stood on the shore and looked out to sea.

Bodorgan Station was empty, and nearby was an empty hotel; Ty Croes was one ruined cottage; and then the land grew stonier and harsher and looked the sort of place where only Druids could be happy—wind-flattened grass and pitted rocks, a few throaty crows and flocks of barking seagulls.

After the village of Valley there was a causeway to Holy Island. We passed a large factory, Anglesey Aluminium, and slowed as we approached the town of Holyhead.

Holyhead was one of a number of British towns that seemed to be dying—blackening like an extremity with gangrene. It was too far, too barren, too still. It had gone to sleep and would die without waking. The ferry business—boats to the Irish port of Dun Laoghaire—was so bad, they were advertising free liters of whiskey for anyone who made the trip. But the ferries remained empty: no one had any money here. In Anglesey, where the local accent was not Welsh but rather a jaw-twisting Birmingham neigh, I was told that the unemployment rate was 30 percent. It was a meaningless statistic—most statistics struck me as sounding frivolous and hastily invented—but the fact remained that people in Holyhead were visibly idle. They did not work, nor did they do much else but sit and stare. The tennis courts and football fields were empty, the bowling greens were empty—no sports. There was little drinking, because no one could afford it; no movies.

"I sleep late and watch TV," a man named Gower told me. He had been on the dole for five years and was only thirty-two.

The streets were empty. I walked through the town and felt a sense of despair, because I could not imagine that things would ever improve here. No one I met believed that the future would be any brighter, and a number of them said casually that they had thought of emigrating. Whenever British people spoke of emigration, they mentioned North America first—Europe was just as bad as Britain, they said, and Australia was too far.

The younger ones had some hope. I deliberately sought out youths in Anglesey and asked them what their plans were. One thirteen-year-old told me he wanted to be a plasterer—I guessed that his father was a plasterer, but I was wrong. A fourteen-year-old told me he wanted to join the Royal Navy, and another's ambition was to be a carpenter. They hated school, and perhaps they were right to hate it; what job would school prepare them for? A sixteen-year-old told me that he was about to take an exam, and then he wanted to go to college. What would he study?

"Catering," he said. His name was Brian Craster.

I asked him if he meant cooking—being a chef.

"Yeah," he said in his neighing accent, "it's a two-year course."

"Then you get a job."

"If there's one going. There's not much work around here. Just British Rail or the Tinto factory"—Rio Tinto Zinc ran Anglesey Aluminium—"but they've started to lay people off."

"Do you do any cooking now, Brian?"

"A bit," he said. "I can make cakes. Shepherd's pie and that."

"Where do you want to be a chef?"

"Maybe London. Maybe get a job at the Savoy."

None of the youths I met in Holyhead had ever been to London. Brian Craster wanted to go, but he seemed a little fearful, and that made him sound defiant.

It was all Council flats and uncut grass, barking dogs and broken stone walls. I felt sorry for the children, kicking tin cans, their hands in their pockets and their hair blowing, dreaming of being plasterers.

I walked through most of the western part of Holy Island, around South Stack, and then back to the harbor. In a bus shelter overlooking New Harbour I saw a poem written in black ink.

Now it is 1984.

Knock-knock at your front door

It's the suede denim secret police

They have come for your uncool niece

Come quickly to the camp

You'll look nice as a drawstring lamp

Don't worry—it's only a shower

For your clothes—here's a pretty flower

DIE

on organic poison gas

Serpent's egg already hatched

You will croak you little clown

When you mess with President Brown!

As I stood copying this into my small notebook, a middle-aged couple approached the bus shelter. They were Owen and Esther Smallbone from the Council estate just west of Holyhead. They had a small flat, for which they paid £16 a week. Owen Smallbone had been an accounts clerk at the harbor and had taken a leave of absence for medical reasons—a bad back—but when he recovered sufficiently to return to his job, there was no job, and he had been on the dole ever since—four years. Esther sometimes earned a little money looking after the children of working mothers—the Smallbones had no children of their own—but there was not much child-minding these days, because the mothers were being laid off, weren't they? They were always the first to go. Recently, Owen's back had begun again to bother him, which was why they were taking the bus. They were on the way to the General Post Office on Boston Street to purchase a Television Broadcast Receiving Licence (Including Colour)—"apparatus for wireless telegraphy." They rented a Sony Trinitron eighteen inch for £12 a month. The license for watching it would cost £46.

They were very suspicious of me. I wondered why, and then I saw the reason. I had put my notebook away, but I was still holding my pen. So I had probably written that crazy poem, or if not the poem, then perhaps I had drawn the picture of the penis, or else set down my telephone number with the message Ring Roger for a good time, guys, or—and this was the most likely—I was the one going around Holyhead scribbling FREE WALES and FWA, one of the arsonists. My knapsack told a story.

The Smallbones glanced at my pen. They were very annoyed—they were decent people, but even decent people could not find work these days. They were law-abiding—masses of people never bothered to buy a TV license and didn't give a tinker's curse when the television-detector van parked in Mostyn Close and trained its radar on the flats, fully aware that people inside the flats were watching "Championship Darts" or "The Dukes of Hazzard" without a license. And the Smallbones respected public property: they hated graffiti, and these on the wall of the bus shelter had been written by perverts, lunatics, and fanatics. Sometimes it made them ashamed to be Welsh. Sometimes they felt like just jacking it in and going to Nova Scotia like the Davises, but that was years ago, and who wanted to hire a man with a bad back?

Ten minutes passed. The bus did not come. I waited a few more minutes and then decided to walk. The Smallbones were still waiting, and after I had gone they examined the walls of the bus shelter, trying to determine which scribbles were mine.

I returned to Llandudno Junction for the third time and then to Llandudno. Now I noticed that there were seagulls on the platform of Llandudno Station, thirty or forty of them, waiting the way pigeons waited at Waterloo.

At last I decided to leave Wales. I took another train to Llandudno Junction. Today was Friday, and the train was full of people returning to their homes in industrial Lancashire and West Yorkshire. Some had been farther afield than Rhos-on-Sea and Colwyn Bay.

"The people crowded round us," Janet Hosegood said. She was a librarian in Runcorn. She loved to travel. She had spent last year's Easter vacation on a group tour of three Chinese cities, Canton, Suchow, and Shanghai, as she was telling old Mr. Bolus, who had never been east of Mablethorpe.

Mr. Bolus said, "Ee?"

"They'd never seen eyes like ours," Miss Hosegood said. She was fifty-one and loved country walks. Spinster, she wrote when marital status was asked for. She hated the abbreviation "Ms."—"Miss!" she usually said, showing her teeth.

Mr. Bolus said, "Ee?"

"In Channah," Miss Hosegood said.

"Ee?"

"People's Repooblic," Miss Hosegood said.

"Aye," Mr. Bolus said.

"'cause their eyes are slanty-like," Miss Hosegood said.

"Aye," Mr. Bolus said.

"Six 'oondred and fifty pound it cost us, all in," Miss Hosegood said.

But Mr. Bolus had been distracted from this talk of China by the bulldozers outside Colwyn Bay, preparing to build something. It can only be something awful, he thought, for here there was mile after mile of shallys and villas and caravans and tents, facing the Irish Sea.

At last Mr. Bolus looked away and said, "Ee?"

Although it was a pleasant, rattly two-car train, it was rather full of people and belongings. But what was especially annoying to the others was the appearance of Roland Painter-Betty and his dog, Ollie, the pair of them pushing down the aisle and then taking the only empty seat—seats, rather, because Roland snagged the window and the dirty great Alsatian leaped onto the seat next to him.