The Kingdom by the Sea

"Wonder if he paid full fare?" a man named Garside muttered.

Janet Hosegood said, "That dog should be on the flipping floor."

And they also hated the sight of Roland Painter-Betty's earring and chunky bracelet and Liberty scarf and the kind of puce-colored shoes no normal man would wear.

It was all caravans here, from Abergele east, places with names like Golden Sands, just tin boxes, miles of them, on flat stretches of sand—no trees.

We crossed the River Clwyd and came to Rhyl, which was stained with soot and looked punished. Its fun fair and amusement park were silent, and it looked truly terrible.

Verna and Doreen, neighbors from Wallasey, had turned away from Rhyl. This was the last day of their holiday and they didn't want it spoiled—Verna explained that the sight of grotty places could leave a bad taste in your mouth. They talked about a mutual friend, Rose, who had recently moved into Stanley Road.

"How's she getting on, then?" Verna asked.

"Talks to everyone. She's got a word for everyone," Doreen said.

"She's a Londoner."

"Well, this is it, isn't it. Your Londoners are a very outgoing people, aren't they."

Some of the caravans were on marshland, sinking badly, some of them broken-backed on Morfa Rhuddlan ("where in 759 the Welsh under Caradoc were routed by Offa of Mercia").

No one said a word to Roland Painter-Betty or to Ollie, stinking and slavering on the seat next to him. Everyone knew Roland was getting away with murder. But strangers were not addressed on British trains: they might be maniacs, they might be rude, or, worse, they might come from the class above you. If it was certain the stranger was a foreigner, then it was just possible someone would say, "I wish you wouldn't do that." But Roland was a native, and probably a poofter, and they could be so touchy—worse than women, some of them.

We stopped and everyone looked out the windows: Prestatyn. It was red brick, once important to the lead industry, then a holiday resort that had never quite caught on. COME TO SUNNY PRESTATYN, posters said, mocking the bleak place. The tide was down and sand mounted toward the shore, forming banks and low dunes. Behind Prestatyn lay the empty green hills of Denbighshire.

The River Dee was hopeless with sand—seven miles wide at this point but scarcely navigable, as the brown bubbly flats of the Mostyn Bank seemed to prove. And the land was flat, too; the sheep had cropped it so closely and so evenly, it looked like the surface of stagnant water. The town of Flint had turned its back on the river. It had a sullen wintry look and the British industrial smells of foot rot, dead mice, and old socks. The junkyards outside Shotton were a warning, for Shotton's steelworks were shortly to close and become junkyards, leaving thousands without jobs.

The sky was yellow-gray, like a certain kind of smoke. It was June, and in the immense torpor of the steaming day the passengers had begun to doze off, only one person acknowledging the fact that, just a mile from Chester, we crossed the Welsh border. Mr. Bolus said it had been the Welsh border for a thousand years.

Janet Hosegood was talking, still telling Mr. Bolus—he was deaf, I had now decided—about the People's Republic of China, her last year's holiday.

13. The 16:01 to Southport

NOW I SAW British people lying stiffly on the beach like dead insects, or huddled against the canvas windbreaks they hammered into the sand with rented mallets, or standing on cliffs and kicking stones roly-poly into the sea—and I thought: They are symbolically leaving the country.

Going to the coast was as far as they could comfortably go. It was the poor person's way of going abroad—standing at the seaside and staring at the ocean. It took a little imagination. I believed that these people were fantasizing that they were over there on the watery horizon, at sea. Most people on the Promenade walked with their faces averted from the land. Perhaps another of their coastal pleasures was being able to turn their backs on Britain. I seldom saw anyone with his back turned to the sea (it was the rarest posture on the coast). Most people looked seaward with anxious hopeful faces, as if they had just left their native land.

I was in New Brighton ("Here Sibelius's music, conducted by the composer, was first publicly heard in England"), strolling past the green-haired punks and the Rockers, who carried booming transistor radios as big as suitcases, and listening to the pop group Raw Sewage howl their hit, "Kick It to Death." I had skipped Chester, considering it too far inland for my coastal purposes, and I had taken a train to Birkenhead.

Five miles down the west bank of the River Mersey was Rock Ferry, a yellow and green ferry station made of wood and girders. It was the sort of grand Victorian structure the British were eager to demolish and replace with a building that did not need repainting—something made of corrugated plastic sheets bolted to iron pipes. That very day, the Kensington Town Hall in London had been pulled down, for although it was a fine example of a mid-Victorian baroque façade, the Tory Council said it was worth only half a million pounds. The site, they claimed, was worth eight times that to a property developer for a bombproof, high-density, Manhattan-style condo. So much for the Victorian baroque. Kensington needed cash, the councilors said. "We can't afford to be sentimental." It seemed only a matter of time before such a lovely building as this ferry landing was bulldozed into the river.

Liverpool—it was obvious from the ferry—was full of elegant old buildings. They were heavy but graceful. The city had three cathedrals and many church spires, and just as many open spaces from the blasts of German bombs. (We live in a time of short memories. A German tourist in Liverpool told me that he found the city rather wrecked and depressing—he much preferred Scotland.) Liverpool was not pleasant—no city was—but it was not bad. It was elderly, venerable, tough, somewhat neglected, and it had a very exposed look, because it was a city on the sea, one of the few large cities in Britain that was subjected to ocean gales. That was the Liverpool look: weatherbeaten.

I had expected it to be frightening: it was known as a city of riots. But it struck me as good-humored, and inhabited by many people as alien as I was, living more or less as they pleased in what had once been extremely fine houses—the Somali Social Centre was in a cracked Georgian house. It was the most Irish city in Britain, and so the most Catholic. The Pope had just visited and been wildly welcomed. The papal flags, yellow and white, were still fluttering from the beer signs on public houses and on streets down which the "pope-mobile" (it was bulletproof, in spite of its silly name) had passed.

Emboldened by the apparent calm, I decided to walk from the pier head to the black district of Toxteth, which everyone called Liverpool Eight. The previous summer at about this time the district had been in flames. Most of Liverpool's forty thousand blacks lived in Liverpool Eight.

I met a lady tramp. She was more gray than white, about sixty-odd, and had the self-indulgent look of the drunken duchesses who were pictured in the society pages of the Tatler. She wore a woolly hat. She was pulling a loaded cart and had a dog on a leash. I had never met a lady tramp with a dog. I had the impression that this was her whole household on the cart—all her clothes and furnishings. There was a stink in the cart that may have been food. Her name was Mary Wilson. She quickly pointed out that she was not the same Mary Wilson who was married to a former British Prime Minister.

She said she would show me the way to Toxteth if I pulled her cart for a spell. I did so and nearly wrenched my arm, the thing was so heavy. She said she had picked up some bottles. There was money in bottles if you knew where to flog them.

She took a blackened pipe from under her rags and puffed it.

"Like Harold," she said. "I enjoy my pipe."

She meant Sir Harold Wilson, the former Prime Minister.

Mary's uncle and aunt had gone to the United States. They had intended to settle, but they had returned to Liverpool.

"There was a depression on at the time," she said. "Like this one." And puffed her pipe. It smelled of burning rags. "We'll never see the end of this one."

She had the Liverpool knack of being able to speak without moving her lips.

"What do you want in Toxteth?" she asked.

"Just looking."

"They had riots there," she said. "They bayned the place."

"Who did?"

"The kids!" She didn't say blacks.

Liverpool used to be peaceable, she said. It wasn't peaceable anymore. It was a blewdy disgrace. It was dangerous.

But it did not look disgraceful to me. It was better than the corresponding part of New York City, near the docks in Brooklyn, but had the same bricks and the same pong of dirt and oil and old iron.

Mary Wilson finally shuffled away. Her little dog's claws scratched on the sidewalk like matches being struck as he trotted beside her.

Mr. Duddy, a street-sweeper I met at the corner of Windsor Street, said, "Toxteth. Go to the cinema that's bayned to the ground, and when you coom to Princes Road, tayn right."

But I was still smiling at him.

He became shifty. "What is it?"

"What was it like to sweep up after the riots?" I asked.

"Shocking," Mr. Duddy said.

"Give me an example."

"They baynt a car," he said.

"A lot of property was burned, I understand."

"They tried to bayn a skule," he said.

"But the whole place was in flames."

"They was poodles of petrol," he said.

"You must have seen some amazing things."

Mr. Duddy thought a moment, then said, "I saw a pule of blood."

I walked on, down Princes Road. It was shabby gentility mixed with unobtrusive ruin. There was something gothic about lovely old buildings half-burned to the ground, or turned into brothels (surely doorbells labeled Fiona and Janine and Miss Tress meant that?). Loud music came from the open windows of the Nigeria Social Club, and at the Sierra Leone Social Club there were fat blacks in bowler hats and shabby business suits on the steps, drinking beer out of cans. I assumed that the "social club" was a way of evading Britain's strict drinking hours, and the names suggested not racism, but rather nationalism or even tribalism; I could not imagine anyone from Upper Volta or Nigeria being welcome in the Ghana Social Club.

Princes Road was a wide boulevard lined with trees. I followed it down to Granby, counting policemen—eight in a matter of minutes. They walked in pairs, carrying steel-tipped canes about a yard long, the sort of weapon that usually has a poetic name, like "wog-basher." The policemen gave the impression of friendliness, and deliberately chatted with bystanders and small children, seeming to ignore the graffiti that said pigs out and Why are coppers like bananas—coz they yellow, they bent, and they come in bunches.

The shops on side streets had either boarded-up windows or else steel-mesh grates, and the same grates sheathed the public phoneboxes. I stepped into one of these phoneboxes and called the Central Police Station and asked the information officer how many black policemen there were in Liverpool.

"Who wants to know?" he asked.

"Just a curious American," I said.

"I should have known," he said. "I'll tell you something—Liverpool is nothing like America. I know about the trouble you've got over there, and compared to that, this is nothing. I could give you figures—"

"For starters, how many black policemen?"

"Twelve colored officers," he said. And the entire force was forty-six hundred.

"Twelve!" I laughed and hung up.

And the "colored" was interesting, too. Policemen were "colored," convicted criminals were "West Indian," and purse-snatchers were "nig-nogs." But when a black runner came first in a race against foreigners, he was "English." If he came second, he was "British." If he lost, he was "colored." If he cheated, he was "West Indian."

I kept walking. The riots had left marks on Liverpool Eight that were visible a year later: the broken windows had not been fixed, there were signs of scorching on walls and doors, and temporary barricades had been left in place. And there were posters advertising lectures by members of the Communist Party and the Socialist Workers Party—very angry lectures, judging by the titles ("Fight Back!" "We Demand Action!" and so forth). And yet this area was not the ruin I had expected. I had been promised a wasteland, but it was no more than fine decaying houses and rotting odors.

In a ploy to gain entrance to a house, I asked a shopkeeper (Ma-nubhai Patel, formerly of Kampala, Uganda; dry goods and sundries) if he knew of a person who might sew a button on my leather jacket. Yes, he knew a karia —Gujarati for black—just around the corner.

"Thanks very much," I said.

"Kwaheri, bwana."

God, I thought, that feels good. It had been years since anyone had called me bwana.

Mrs. Luster was from Barbados. She had lived in England since 1953, when West Indians were encouraged to leave their homes and immigrate to Britain by the Conservative government—it was thought there would be a severe labor shortage very soon. Mrs. Luster had worked for about twenty years in a shirt factory, and then it closed ("all these imports from Hong Kong"). She was fifty-seven and had been married twice; both husbands had died. Every night she said a prayer for God to send her another husband: it was no fun living alone. In her Council flat, four upstairs rooms of an Edwardian terrace house (rent: £9 a week), she had pictures of the Queen, the Pope, Prince Andrew, the wedding of Prince Charles and Lady Diana, and Jesus Christ showing his heart in flames. Most of the pictures she had cut from magazines, but she also had postcards stuck to the wall, and five calendars, and there was so much furniture, I had to walk very slowly, sliding between heavily upholstered chairs.

I asked her what she thought of Britain.

Mrs. Luster said, "It ain't what it was."

Not far from Mrs. Luster's house I saw three young men standing on the sidewalk. Their names were Pitt, Oliver, and Peery. They had all been born in Liverpool and were out of work. They were each about twenty years old. When I approached them, they were discussing the fortunes of a man who rejoiced in the name Funso Banjo. They claimed I knew him, but I said I had never before heard the wonderful name of Funso Banjo.

I asked them whether they thought there would be riots this year in Liverpool Eight.

Peery said, "We already had a riot!"

"April," Oliver said. "Pretty big one, too."

This was news to me. It had not been in any newspapers that I had seen.

They said that there was often trouble but that it was seldom reported by the national newspapers.

"They can't report everything," I said. "How big was the riot?"

They said that hundreds of people had taken part and that three cars had been burned. It had happened after the arrest of a black boy by the police—rumors had spread that the boy had been shot or beaten up by the police. The rumors were not true, but the riot had taken place just the same, and no one was sorry, because (Oliver told me) the police were always stopping black people and searching them.

I said, "Do you think there will be more riots?"

"Depends on the police, don't it?" Pitt said.

I said, "Then why not join the police?"

They reacted like scalded cats, and then they laughed, as if I had suggested the most improbable thing in the world.

"Just give me one reason," I said.

"No one would talk to you," Oliver said.

Peery said, "You wouldn't have a friend left!"

I said that I had expected to find a devastated area, but instead this part of Liverpool seemed to me rather pleasant, with a good bus service and plenty of shops, even if they did have boarded-up windows.

Oliver said, "It's not bad now." And he smiled. "But it's different when it gets dark."

Sundown found me walking rapidly out of Liverpool Eight.

***

The train to Southport was a busy branch line, because the whole nineteen miles of coast that was designated Merseyside was inhabited by Liverpool's commuters. The first few miles were taken up with warehouses and the cranes of the dockyards. It was grimy and Brooklynesque, especially in the dark brick of the railway cut at Bank Hall, and again at the two Bootle Stations, the first with a black brimful canal and an old factory sign saying treacle for health, the second Bootle Station, New Strand, with its flattened buildings and vacant lots.

Even after six miles, it seemed to me that we had never really left Liverpool—an unbroken line of dirty buildings continued up the coast, the same age as the buildings in Liverpool proper but, because they were darker and lower, very dreary. Waterloo ("founded in 1815") was a decrepit place, and it was nine miles before I saw any grass growing beside the line. At last the stations had a countrified look, and a lighter, leafier aspect. They had names like High-town and Freshfields, but they were fine—places in Britain with names like Freshfields I had found almost invariably to be slums.

We came to a grassy duney heath, with hundreds of low burial mounds, or tumuli. Perhaps they were bunkers from the war, though they may well have been bunkers from the golf courses that proliferated here—six so far, and we were not even in Southport. The land continued flat, the commuters got off the little train and walked home through the pink and purple lupins, and then, forty minutes after leaving Liverpool, we arrived at the back end of Southport.

It seemed odd for a seaside resort to be built in one of the rainiest areas of Britain, but that was not the oddest feature of Southport. Odder still was its Promenade, which was a quarter of a mile from the beach; and at low tide it was a mile along the beach to the water on the hard brown sand. When the tide was down, the beach was a long ludicrous desert, but flatter than any desert I had seen. Cars drove across it. The pier was high and dry. The sun at nine-thirty P.M. seemed to be setting at the far end of Egypt. There was no watery shimmer, no indication that it was setting in the ocean. It bumped the planet and was gone. Southport was a cluttered seaside resort without much sea, at the edge of seemingly limitless sands.

Because swimming had always been so hard to manage in Southport, the town had erected salt-water swimming pools, and a large mosaic on a bathhouse on the Front advertised, Victorian Seawater Baths—Entirely New Turkish, Russian and Swimming Baths—Finest in District. That was an old red brick place, but there was a new one not far away with an Olympic-size pool, or "pule," as they described it.

I stayed in a Southport bed-and-breakfast place with a family, the Bertrams: Herb, out of work and suspicious and always eyeing me nervously when Trish ("I find I can really relax with Americans") got down on all fours on the parlor carpet to retrieve Jason's Happy Family playing cards from under the sofa, or to sweep, or to shampoo the carpet. Trish was frequently on her hands and knees when I was sitting in the room. It was a posture that unnerved Herb. It was as if, in ape terms, she was "presenting" to me—the bum show that matters so much in baboon society. Was she symbolically submitting to me as she sponged the carpet? Herb picked his teeth and narrowed his eyes, daring me to look.

They were a young couple, they had always lived in Southport, and they hated it. Two days with the Bertrams made me gloomy, and sometimes in the evening I felt we were three baboons in the room—no conversation, but a great deal of meaningful posturing. They had pawned their best wedding present, a silver After Eight Mints' dispenser in the shape of an old English coach and horses—the box of mints went into the coach. Twenty-eight pounds it was worth, but the pawnbroker would give them only eleven. They often grumbled about this, using it as a personal illustration of their hard times. Their hopelessness and depression were infectious. They believed that nothing would ever happen to them to change their lives for the better. I had always imagined that people in this plight would become curious about the world and its possibilities; but they were indifferent to it.

Even Jason, who was twelve, was lacking in hope. He was a bright boy, but he said he was in the B class. "All the posh woons are in the A class. Teacher's pets and that." He said he was planning to leave school when he was sixteen.

"What would your mother say about that?"

"Me moom don't care."

The dislike of school was not unusual, but the widespread distrust of education was another matter. Perhaps it was justified. Everyone said the schools were bad—the only good ones were private ones—and it was a fact that many well-educated people were on the dole. And yet it depressed me to think of this young family dying of indifference.

Lord Street in Southport was a grand boulevard with arcades and Victorian iron canopies. It was gritty northern splendor—wide streets and big drafty buildings. But there were a great number of elderly people on it, and they added to Southport's atmosphere of feebleness and senility. Herb explained that this was June, the low season, and old age pensioners had special rates at hotels all over the Lancashire coast. I would see masses of mentally defective people, too, he promised; mental defectives also got special rates in the low season.

The day I left, I walked up to Marshside Sands, where Merseyside meets Lancashire, and then walked back again. A car followed me along the beach, passed me, and then stopped. The driver got out and sat on a bench, staring at me. I thought it might have been Herbert Bertram having another apish fit of jealousy. But no—it was a youth in a leather jacket. I kept walking. I reached Marine Drive. He had got back into his car and followed me again. He drew up beside me.

"Want a lift?"

I said no.

"Pity," he said, and drove away.

Love on all fours. It wasn't passion; it was just more pathetic sex.

On the branch line to Wigan, I opened the local Southport newspaper and read an advertisement for pornographic films. Two big screens—Live strip tease—only £2—This Week "The Hot One"—Reduced admission for unemployed, students, and Old Age Pensioners.

That, surely, was a sign of the times, and a vision of the world to come: discounts on pornography if you were unemployed or a student or very old, for the chances were much greater that if you were one or the other, you would have enough spare time to turn porn shows into a habit.

Blackpool was only ten miles from Southport, but there was no direct road or train—the River Ribble was in the way—so I went via Burscough Bridge and Parbold and through flat green vegetable fields to Wigan to change trains. Almost fifty years before, George Orwell had come here and used this manufacturing town to examine English working life and the class structure. He had found "labyrinths of little brick houses blackened by smoke, festering in planless chaos round miry alleys and little cindered yards where there are stinking dustbins and lines of grimy washing and half-ruinous w.c.'s."

But Wigan today, on a cold overcast morning in June, had a somewhat countrified look—like a market town, its winding main street on a little hill, with red brick hotels and two railway stations and many public houses fitted with bright mirrors and brasswork. I walked out of the center of the town, and it seemed to me that Crook Street, with its cobblestones, and hemmed in between the railway embankment and the Colliers' Arms, could not have changed for a hundred years. The dark red terrace houses had flat fronts and leaded windows and soot on the pointing of the brick that emphasized the bricks' redness. This was what Orwell had seen.

It was now lifeless. The town had once been a center of coal mining and cotton mills. Both industries were gone. Orwell had thought Wigan illustrated the evils of industry and the miseries of workers' lives. But he would have found that unthinkable today, because the only industry left was a canning factory. There was a kind of grubby vitality in The Road to Wigan Pier (the title was a lame joke—there was no pier), and a ferocious indignation that working people were treated so badly. But now there was very little work. This was an area of desperately high unemployment, of a deadly calm—which was also like panic—and of an overwhelming emptiness. Orwell's anger had made the suffering Wigan of his book still seem a place of possibility. Better labor laws, compassionate management, conscientious government, and more self-awareness ("the working classes do smell!") would, he suggested, enable Wigan to be resurrected.

What Orwell had not reckoned on—no one had—was that the bottom would fall out, and that in this postindustrial slump, with little hope of recovery, Wigan would be as bereft of energy and as empty a ruin as Stonehenge. So there was a terrible poignancy in his complaints about the working conditions in the mills and the factories and the mines, for when the mills did not run and the factories were shut and the pits were closed, the effect was more terrible than the worst industrial defilement.

The real nightmare of northern England today was not the blackened factory chimneys and the smoke and the slag heaps and the racket of machines; it was the empty chimneys and the clear air and the grass growing on slag heaps, and the great silence. No one talked about working conditions now; there was no work. Industry had come and gone. It was as if a wicked witch had heard Orwell's carping ("factory whistles ... smoke and filth") and said, "Then you shall have nothing!" and swept it all away.

One of the most famous passages of Orwell's book described a young woman he saw from a train near Wigan. She was kneeling on stones and poking a stick into a waste pipe to unblock it. "She looked up as the train passed" and her face wore "the most desolate, hopeless expression I have ever seen." Hers was not "the ignorant suffering of an animal. She knew well enough what was happening to her." And Orwell closed with the thought that she understood all the implications of her filthy job and realized what a "dreadful destiny" she faced.

That vivid description made me watchful in Wigan. I was walking back to Wigan North-Western Station when, passing a row of "little gray slum houses at right angles to the embankment"—a train was just passing—I saw an old woman hanging out her washing. A light rain had begun to fall. It seemed sad for an old woman to be hanging gray laundry on a line in the rain, but it made a peculiarly Wiganesque image. And she could have been the same woman who had been kneeling on the cobbles and unblocking the waste pipe in 1936, now grown older and still enduring her destiny.

I was overcome with curiosity and wanted to talk to her. It meant climbing a fence, but she was not startled. She asked me if I was lost.

I said no, I just happened to be passing by—and she smiled, because she had seen me eagerly climbing the fence by the railway embankment.

Her name was Mrs. Midgeley, she was a widow, she was seventy-one. Her age was interesting. The woman Orwell had seen from the train was about twenty-five, and that was in 1936; so she would be seventy-one today.

At the age of fifteen, in 1926, Margaret Midgeley began working in a factory, sewing shirts. She worked from eight in the morning until nine-thirty at night, with slightly fewer hours on Saturdays; her Sundays were free.

"They wouldn't do that today, would they?" she said with pride, and she added, "No, they'd rather go on the dole!"

She was in Wigan, working, when Orwell came. She thought she had heard the name before, but she had never read the book. She said that outsiders seldom had a good word to say about Wigan, but she had been very happy there. She worked for fifteen years in the factory and then got married. Now her husband was dead, her children had moved away; she was alone. She said she often thought about her working days.

"How much did I earn? I had to earn thirty-two shillings."

I said, "What do you mean, 'had to'?"

"I was on piecework," Mrs. Midgeley said. "If I didn't earn thirty-two bob, it meant I was slacking. Oh, the foreman used to talk to us about that! You got shouted at! Maybe you'd only earn a pound, and then you'd be in lumber."

In lumber meant in trouble, Mrs. Midgeley said, but when I checked it in a dictionary of slang, it was described as an obsolescent phrase for being in detention or in prison.

Mrs. Midgeley did not see herself as having been exploited. Her memory of Wigan in the 1930s was of a kind of prosperity, with coal and cotton and a sense of community, and work for anyone who was willing.

"And you could better yourself if you wanted to," she said.

But Wigan was hopeless now, she said. It was laziness and the dole and no prospects. Mrs. Midgeley was nostalgic for the smoke ("Mind you, it could play merry hell with your washing!") and remembered with pleasure her workmates at the factory and their annual outing to Blackpool.

She said it frightened her to think of all the young people with nothing to do. It made her feel unsafe. It was a world without work—and that was a terrible thing to her, who had worked her whole life.

"And where are you off to, then?"

I said Blackpool.

"Lucky old you," she said, and laughed.

On my way out of Wigan on the train I looked out the window and saw a group of white-faced children. The rain had plastered their hair against their tiny heads, and their clothes were soaked, and their bare legs were dirty. They were struggling to pull down a fence at the back of a ruined house. They were busy and violent, they hammered at the pickets, they looked like small dangerous men. When they saw the train, they spat at it and then they went on breaking the old fence.

14. The West Cumbria Line

MOST of the horror cities of northern England were surrounded by smooth hills and cow pastures and the hopeful contours of green space; so it was painful to see how Blackpool sprawled along the eastward bulge of Lancashire, displacing the grassy coastline with a fourteen-mile fun fair, from Lytham St. Anne's to Fleetwood. There was no relief. And now I began to reassess Southport—it is only hindsight that gives travel any meaning—and, looking back, I realized that Southport had been modestly elegant. I had called it cluttered, but Blackpool was real clutter—the buildings that were not only ugly but also foolish and flimsy, the vacationers sitting under a dark sky with their shirts off, sleeping with their mouths open, emitting hog whimpers. They were waiting for the sun to shine, but the forecast was rain for the next five months.

The Falklands War had entered a new phase. British troops were creeping across the main island, preparing to retake Port Stanley. The headlines of the gutter press were QUEEN LASHES ARGIES and THREE BRITISH SHIPS HIT and THE MARCH TOWARDS STANLEY. This harsh news certainly colored my feelings toward Blackpool, because one of the sights of seaside Britain that I knew would stick firmly in my mind was the long Promenade and the three piers at Blackpool: the people sleeping in deck chairs, clutching copies of the daily paper, news of the bloody war. They woke snorting and vengeful-looking, with pink sleep welts on their cheeks, and then they slapped their papers and went on reading. Tomorrow they would be using it for wrapping the fish and chips.

There was no landscape here. The mass of cheap buildings that had risen up and displaced the land had in its bellying way displaced the sea, too. Blackpool was perfectly reflected in the swollen guts and unhealthy fat of its beer-guzzling visitors—eight million in the summer, when Lancashire closed to come here and belch. This was northern gusto! This hideous Promenade was "The Golden Mile"! This bad weather was "bracing"!

But it was just swagger and sandwiches. "Bracing" was the northern euphemism for stinging cold, and it always justified the sadism in the English seaside taunt "Let's get Some color in those cheeks." It was another way of making a freezing wind compensate for the lack of sunshine. And yet not everyone in Blackpool was deceived. Beneath mountainous storm clouds, seventeen people on North Pier paid forty pence each to sit in the Sun Lounge—a sort of greenhouse on the pier with salt-spattered windows—and listen to Raymond Wallbank ("Your Musical Host") play "I'll Be Seeing You" on his console organ until the windows trembled. They sat and listened and read the Daily Mail —FIVE ARGIES DIE IN EXPLOSION—and when Raymond Wallbank took a breather, they chatted. Once again I noticed that the Falklands' news made the English nostalgic about rationing and the blitz.

Mr. Gummer wanted the Argentine mainland to be bombed—why not flatten Buenos Aires? After all, the Argies had captured a British sheep station. Those bloody bean-eaters had to be taught a lesson. Mr. Gummer liked to say that he had been a socialist his whole life, but he had a lot of respect for the Prime Minister. She had guts, and he agreed that it was a good idea to call the British troops "our boys."

He had come to Blackpool to fish. He was retiring this year and lived with his wife, Viv, in a cottage in Swillbrook, just off the motorway. He had paid a pound to stand on the pier with his fishing pole, and after a morning of it he was almost out of the live maggots he used as bait. Mr. Gummer wondered: Should I have a longer pole?

"Hae ye caught owt?" This was Ernie Fudge. The Fudges said they would be stopping a week in Blackpool. Ernie had known Harry Gummer for donkey's years. They were both in wholesale decorating equipment, supplying do-it-yourself shops in this part of Lancashire.

"Nay," Mr. Gummer said. "I want more tackle." He was thinking of the longer pole.

"Got tackle there in 'and!" Mr. Fudge cried. "Too bloody mooch tackle in fishing."

Harry Gummer said, "That's true of every 'obby tha takes oop. Me soon 'as a bloody bamboo pole can reach to bloody flagpole yonder."

Ernie shrugged. He did not want to argue. Fishermen always looked helpless to him, dangling hooks blindly in the sea. But Harry was his friend.

"Hae ye seen 'odges?" Ernie said.

"Aye," Harry said. "He waar at t'oother end. I boomped into 'im. He waar wi' scroofy booger—a big thick bloke." Harry showed with a gesture that the man had a big potbelly. "Union bloke, 'odges says, and I says 'Oh, aye,' and he gives me 'is union bloody card. And then I says—"

I took a tram to Fleetwood, but there was no footpath to Lancaster that way. I returned to Blackpool and realized that the tram system made this part of the coast bearable. I had enjoyed the ride, even if I had used it to list all the features of Blackpool I disliked. And when I asked local people to tell me Blackpool's virtues, I was confirmed in my dislike.

"But it's quaat naas soomtimes," Murine Mudditch said. "We've been living 'ere ever since Ian was made redoondant."

I asked her how she spent her time.

"Drinking and bingo," she said.

"Every day?"

"Most days."

"What if you don't like drinking and bingo?"

Mrs. Mudditch had a bubbling bronchitic laugh.

She said, "Then you've 'ad it!"

I wanted to leave Blackpool, and I was annoyed that it was not possible to walk away. I went to the bus station and bought a ticket to Morecambe. Five of us boarded the bus, and the bus went everywhere, stopping every quarter of a mile, at villages and at isolated public houses, where sad-faced women waited with string bags.

Mrs. Buglass was from Lancaster, but she hated the Lancashire type. She had lived too long in the south of England, she said—it had spoiled her.

"They're dead nosy up here," Mrs. Buglass said. "They want to know all your business—always talking, always asking questions. The people in the south are very polite. They don't go on and on, they don't ask you about your private affairs. That's the big problem up here—no privacy."

She smiled at me. We were on the top deck, front seat, Garstang up ahead.

"I like to keep meself to meself."

And she winked at me.

What was there about an English wink that made me so uncomfortable?

Mrs. Buglass said, "I'd give anything to go back to Southend!"

"I'm on my way to Southend," I said.

She winked again. "You're going in the wrong direction, darling."

No, I said, I would get there eventually: I was going clockwise.

***

Morecambe was wrapped around the edge of a dirty sea, scowling, its blackened terraces and hotels reminiscent of certain fierce churches—all spikes and shadows. Much of the foreshore was stony, but where there was sand, there were naked children kneeling and fat ladies holding their skirts against their thighs.

"Aye! This is good for you! Yer mightn't feel any benny fit for ages and ages. Boot—"

And there were ponies, too, and heaps of pony shit, and on the Front the joyless Pleasure Park and Fun City and Giftarama and a Gypsy fortuneteller named Annie Lee, who looked at my knapsack and announced in a voice full of dramatic clairvoyance that I was a traveler and that I had never been to Morecambe before—nor was I likely to come here again, she added, which was incontestable.

But I liked Morecambe for being sedate and dull and unapologetic. Its stateliness had been eroded by the blasts of wind, and it was the dampest place I had seen since Cornwall, but this lugubrious mood seemed to suit it. It astonished me that anyone would come here for a vacation and to have fun, since it seemed the sort of place that would fill even the cheeriest visitor—me, for example—with thoughts of woe. I imagined day-trippers getting off the train and taking one look and bursting into tears. But most people at Morecambe were enjoying themselves in the drizzle, and the fault was mine, not theirs. This was just another cultural barrier I was incapable of surmounting.

Nothing is more bewildering to a foreigner than a nation's pleasures, and I never felt more alien in Britain than when I was watching people enjoying their sort of seaside vacation.

On the branch-line train that traveled around Morecambe Bay in a wide swing to Barrow-in-Furness, I thought: This is the first part of the north coast that doesn't look blighted. Perhaps it was because we were leaving Lancashire and entering Cumbria, crossing from county to county in Silverdale, where there were daisies growing on the platform, and the ringing stench of cow manure—a smell that sang pleasantly like rotten ozone. It was hilly, green, misty, and the bay was so sandy, it was possible on a good day to walk the nine miles across to Grange-over-Sands. I remarked on the lovely bay, but a schoolgirl named Gina (straw boater, necktie, blazer) said that the water was so filthy, it was impossible to swim, and there was also quicksand out there that sucked you under.

There were more wide wet patches on Cartmel Sands, and small black islands just offshore. We came to Ulverston ("Here Stan Laurel the film comedian was born"). It was a day's walk to the Lake District, up the River Crake and through the Furness Fells to Grizedale Forest and the long lakes of Windermere and Coniston Water. But I had vowed to stick to the coast. I was not in search of natural wonders. And not far away there was A great branch line that went from Barrow to Carlisle, much of it along the coast: the West Cumbria Line.

***

This part of the English coast had everything. It had fishing villages and mountains and coal mines that went under the sea. It had footpaths and a good train and several industrial towns; it had a soft duney shore; and it had the scariest-looking nuclear reactor I had ever seen.

The Cumbrian Mountains rose up on the other side of Duddon Sands, the bare summit of Black Combe, and from Foxfield to Bootle the foothills of these mountains had forced the railway directly onto the coast. After Bootle the land became flatter; I was looking for a likely place to get off the train, and almost did at Ravenglass ("the junction of the Esk, the Mite, and the Irt"), but I was not quick enough.

To see Britain, I had had to think of ways of slowing myself down. It was a small kingdom, and even the great folds and rucks of its coast were not enough to make me feel as though I were traversing great tracts of land. I was always aware that I was only a matter of hours from London, though the differences in landscape and manners were so vast, it sometimes seemed a world away. But the coast of Britain was not always the past. Sometimes it had the face of the future. That was certainly the case on this line at Windscale—and Windscale was so much a part of the future that it was not yet on the Ordnance Survey Map.

But there was something there. It had the simplicity and proportions of an enormous tomb and was the more frightening for its absence of identifiable features. Something so new, so huge, so heavily fenced-in, on so distant a beach, had to be dangerous. On this old corrugated coast its size alone was disturbing, and its fresh red paint looked alarming against the gray landscape. Its cooling chimneys and its towers gave it the appearance of a Martian castle, but essentially this coastal monstrosity was no more than a tremendous box. There was nothing subtle about it. Its long flat planes made it grotesque. Even if you did not know what it was, it would still have been fearsome; it was not that it was unfamiliar, but rather that it looked dangerously explosive.

It was of course another nuclear power station—the nuclear pile at Windscale.

New track was being laid for a line going in and out of the plant. It would connect to this branch line. That was certainly another sign of the times. The only new railway track I saw being laid in Britain, this little spur to the nuclear power station, was for radioactive material, not passengers.

"They say they're not dangerous," a man next to me said. His name was Cutbill, but he pronounced it "Cootbill." "That's what they say—they're safe as houses."

"Do you think they're right?" I had no idea whom he meant by "they."

Mr. Cutbill said, "Know something? You can't insure them." And he grinned. "That's encouraging, isn't it? I mean to say, if they're so bloody safe, why can't you insure them?" Then he laughed: he knew the answer to that question.

It was low tide—great empty beaches of black rocks and black sand, and rock pools that looked greasy in the poor light. I had expected something different—greener, higher, fresher, perhaps Wordsworthian. That was the trouble with England—it was imaginary. "The West Cumbria Line" called up images of deserted woodland and steep fells and pikes, not a nuclear time bomb of incomparable ugliness on a black coast.

It was at that point that Cutbill told me about the coal mines. They had been running for hundreds of years. ("Whitehaven," Defoe wrote in 1725, "now the most eminent port in England for the shipping of coals.") One of the pits had been sunk in 1780, but it had closed in the 1940s, when an explosion killed a hundred and forty-seven men. Cutbill knew all the dates and all the casualty statistics. An explosion at Wellington Pit in 1910 had killed, he said, "a hundred and fifty men and boys." Haig Pit was still working.

"And the interesting thing," Cutbill said, "is that the mine shafts are under the sea—they go straight out, some of them for miles. But they're never flooded, and the water that leaks in is fresh, not salty."

A green headland loomed, and the train slowed down. This was St. Bees. I liked the look of it—villagey, with a handsome school on the right and cliffs on the left; I even liked its funny name. And this was a good time of day—the sun breaking beneath late-afternoon clouds for a long well-lighted evening.

"I think I'll get off here," I said.

"I've got things to do in Corkickle," Cutbill said. "I'm not like you blokes with your rooksacks," and he smiled. "I've got to fill the unforgiving minute."

Kipling, the great standby in the English oral tradition. The English often quoted with approval writers they hadn't read, just as they damned, as vulgar or dull, places they hadn't been.

I walked around St. Bees ("named from St. Bega, a 7th-century Irish maiden") and then, because Cutbill had aroused my curiosity with his talk of submarine coal mines, I walked on to Rottington and Whitehaven.

I could smell the coal and the potash before I saw the town. Whitehaven was old and moribund, and like many another bad place in England, its only hotel was dreary and expensive—the equivalent of $25 for a narrow room and a damp bathmat. Writing my diary that night, I generalized on this, concluding that every large hotel at which I had stayed in England was run-down or badly managed—overpriced, understaffed, and dirty, the staff overworked and slow; and all the smaller places were preferable, the smallest always the best. The English were great craftsmen but poor mass-producers of goods. They were brilliant at running a corner shop, but were failures when they tried their hand at supermarkets. Perhaps this had something to do with their sense of anonymity? Person to person, I had found them truthful and efficient and humane. But anonymity made them lazy, dishonest, and aggressive. Hidden in his car, the Englishman was often impatient to the point of being murderous; over the phone, he was unhelpful and frequently rude. They were not timid, but shy; shyness made them tolerant, but it also gave them a grudge against foreigners, whom they regarded as boomers and show-offs. It was hard to distinguish hotels in England from prisons or hospitals—most of them were run with the same indifference or cruelty, and were equally uncomfortable. The larger an English industry was, the more likely it was to go bankrupt, because the English were not naturally corporate people—they disliked working for others and they seemed to resent taking orders. On the whole, directors were treated absurdly well, and workers badly, and most industries were weakened by class suspicion and false economies and cynicism. But the same qualities that made English people seem stubborn and secretive made them, face to face, reliable and true to their word. I thought: The English do small things well and big things badly.

I called the Haig Pit the next day and asked whether I could go down the mine. I thought it would make a good story, another Orwell footnote, and an underground railway as well, "The Railway Under the Sea," sweating Cumbrians toiling at the coal face by the light of flaring lamps, here in the bowels of the earth, the sewer of the Lake District; all of it strange news—and you thought you knew something about England!

"Because it's more than my job's worth," Jack Smale was saying in a discouraging way. "If I let you go down there and something happens, I'll be in dead trouble. How do I know you're not going to throw a fit or something?"

"I promise not to throw a fit," I said.

"You can bloody promise anything you like, but if you've never been down a mine before, how do you know what's going to happen? You might come all over queer."

"I suppose I can't promise that I won't come all over queer," I said.

"I don't make the rules," Mr. Smale said. "It's just that our insurance people are always on at us."

"I only wanted to have a look," I said.

Mr. Smale said, "I don't want to be rude, mate. But—"

It was one of the rudest expressions in English; it was certainly the tetchiest.

We were of course speaking on the phone. If I had asked Mr. Smale that question in the Colliers' Arms on Whitehaven harbor one evening while he was smiling into his pint of beer ("Aye, it's brain damage, but it's loovely stoof—"), he would probably have said, "I'm supposed to say no, but I don't see the harm in it"—the English workingman enjoyed a conspiratorial posture—"Pop round in the morning and I'll sort you out"—and would wink—"I'll see you right."

I decided to leave Whitehaven. It was partly because four different people told me that George Washington's grandmother was buried in the local churchyard. It was a disappointing town—hundreds of small dark houses pitched across a bare hillside, and an air of doom about it. Coal-mining towns always seemed to wear an expression of fatigue, and they had a scattered volcanic look, the itch of coal dust, the atmosphere of eruption.

The rest of the coast, from the window of the train, was low and disfigured. There were small bleak towns like Parton and Harrington, and huge horrible ones like Workington, with its steelworks—another insolvent industry. And Maryport was just sad; it had once been an important coal and iron port, and great sailing ships had been built there in Victorian times. Now it was forgotten. Today there was so little shipbuilding on the British coast, it could be said not to exist at all. But that was not so odd as the fact that I saw very few vessels in these harbors and ports—a rusty freighter, a battered trawler, some plastic sailboats—there was not much more, where once there had been hundreds of seagoing vessels.

I watched for more. What I saw was ugly and interesting, but before I knew what was happening, the line cut inland, passing bramble hedges and crows in fields of silage and small huddled-together farm buildings and church steeples in distant villages. We had left the violated coast, and now the mild countryside reasserted itself. It was green farms all the way to Carlisle—pretty and extremely dull.

KESWICK PUNKS, a scrawl said in Carlisle, blending Coleridge and Wordsworth with Johnny Rotten. But that was not so surprising. It was always in the fine old provincial towns and county seats that one saw the wildest-looking youths, the pink-haired boys and the girls in leopard-skin tights, the nose jewels and tattooed earlobes. I had seen green hair and swastikas in little Llanelli. I no longer felt that place names like Taunton or Exeter or Bristol were evocative of anything but graffiti-covered walls, like those of noble Carlisle, crowned with a castle and with enough battlements and city walls to satisfy the most energetic vandal, VIOLENT REVOLUTION, it said, and THE EXPLOITED and ANARCHY! and SOCIAL SCUM. Perhaps they were pop groups? THE REJECTS, THE DEFECTS, THE OUTCASTS, THE DAMNED, and some bright new swastikas and THE BARMY ARMY. And on the ancient walls, SKINHEADS RULE!

Some of it was hyperbole, I supposed, but it was worth spending a day or so to examine it. It fascinated me as much as did the motorcycle gangs, who raced out of the oak forests and country lanes to terrorize villagers or simply to sit in a thatch-roofed pub, averting their sullen dirty faces. I did not take it personally when they refused to talk to me. They would not talk to anyone. They were English, they were country folk, they were shy. They were dangerous only by the dozen; individually they were rather sweet and seemed embarrassed to be walking down the High Street of dear old Halt-whistle in leather jackets inscribed Hell's Angels or The Damned.

The graffiti suggested that England—perhaps the whole of Britain—was changing into a poorer, more violent place. And it was easier to see this deterioration on the coast and in the provincial towns than in a large city. The messages were intended to be shocking, but England was practically unshockable, so the graffiti seemed merely a nuisance, an insult. And that was how I began to think of the whole country; if I had only one word to describe the expression of England's face I would have said: insulted.

15. The Boat Train to Ulster

THERE WAS a gloomy irritable air about the passengers on the boat train to Ulster. It was not only that they had been on board for five hours and had three more to go before the ferry. It was worse than tiredness. It was resentment—as if they were being exiled or forced back to school or jailed after a period of freedom. But in fact they were homeward bound.

I had joined the train at Carlisle. I expected to see either drunks or sleepers—it was midafternoon. But the passengers sat silently, holding their sallow faces in their hands, and they became gloomier as we progressed through the long Scottish hills of the border—Dumfries and Galloway. They were the sad-faced people in the wind at gray Stranraer.

By then the Scots had got off the train—the men who sat six to a table with a bottle of vodka and twenty cans of Tartan Ale; the families sitting in a nest of newspapers and sandwich wrappers and plastic bags; the poor stinking trampled terriers and their defiant owners; and the children screeching, "How much farva!" and "I can hear funda!" No trains got more befouled than the ones to Scotland, but this boat train was mostly empty by the time it reached Kilmarnock, and so on the last stage of its journey, along the Firth of Clyde, it looked wrecked and abandoned, the beer cans clanking and the bottles rolling on the floor, and an atmosphere of sour mayonnaise and stale cigarette smoke.

But I liked the hills and I was relieved once again to be near the shore. It was green countryside on a granite sea. Some of the coast was bare; in places there were forests, and hidden in deep lovely valleys there were baronial houses. The gray town of Girvan, with stone houses and squinting windows, had its back turned to the water and wind. At Glenwhilly there were crimson poppies beside the track.

It was here, just before arriving, that the returning Ulster people became very irritable.

"Go and sit dine!"

"I'm tulling ya fer the last time!"

"I says go and find your suster!"

"Don't look so surpraised!"

The Ulster accent is disliked in England, where it is regarded as a harsh, bastard, Lowland Scots with a Glaswegian glottal stop. It is a blustering accent, and just as Welsh people seem permanently conciliatory in the way they speak, so the gabbling Ulster folk seem forever on the boil, trying to swallow and be cruel at the same time. The accent seems full of strain and greed, and yet the people are relaxed and friendly. A linguistic quirk makes them seem angry; it is as odd and as fascinating as the national lisp in Spain. Each time I heard an Ulsterman open his mouth, I reached for my pen, like a missionary learning a tribal language and imagining a vernacular Bible or a dictionary.

Stranraer, in Loch Ryan, on the sea, was the main town on a peninsula shaped like a hammerhead. The ferry Galloway Princess was at the quayside, waiting for the arrival of the boat-train passengers to Larne. There were not many of us, but everyone was searched, including the children—and the officers groped even in the infants' clothes. I was frisked, and then my knapsack was sifted through. They found my sheaf of maps, my binoculars, my notebook, my switchblade knife.

"And what's your purpose in going to Northern Ireland?" the policeman asked. This was Constable Wallace. Crumbs, the things he'd seen!

"Just looking around," I said. "A little business, a little pleasure. I might do a spot of bird-watching."

"Carry on then," Officer Wallace said, and handing me my knife, he turned to his mate and said, "A spot of bird-watching."

There was a sign at the ferry entrance listing the various people who would not be allowed on board the Galloway Princess: rowdy people, drunks, and "football supporters ... displaying their club 'favors' in any shape or form."

Over dinner, Jack Mehaffy said, "It's because the football clubs are one religion or another, and if you wear a certain color scarf you're a Catholic or you're a Protestant. It causes friction. They don't want trouble on this boat."

We met by chance: we were each dining alone and so were asked to sit at the same table. The conversation got off to a slow start. Later, Mehaffy said, "You don't talk too much unless you know who you're talking to. No one in Northern Ireland expresses opinions of any kind to strangers until he's very sure his listeners will be sumpathetic. If not, they'll puck a fight."

Perhaps our conversation was typical. It took us forty-five minutes to get to religion and another hour before Mehaffy volunteered that he was a Protestant. By then it would have been too late to quarrel about Irish politics. We were friends.

He had not stated his religion. He had said in a challenging way, "I'm British." But that meant the same thing as Protestant. He was in the tailoring business and he told me how, very soon, most tailoring would be done automatically by sewing machines operated by microchips. This was bad news for Ulster, where shirt factories employed large numbers of people. Mehaffy said many were being closed down—he had shut a number of them himself.

He had grown up in a neighborhood in County Down with Protestants and Catholics. "We didn't have much money, and when we were short it was the Catholics who helped us out, not the Loyalists, who were always running the Union Jack up the flagpole. We're still friendly with those Catholic families."

He told me about his being a scoutmaster and how he always had Catholic boys in his troop. He asked the local priest's permission to include those boys, and the priest said, "Yes, me only regret is that you're doing something I wish I were doing meself."

"I liked him for saying that," Mehaffy said.

We talked about tailoring, about unemployment, about strife, and that was when he said, "I'm British. But I'm also Irish. I mean, culturally I'm British, but I was born in Ireland, so I'm Irish too."

"Do you feel an affinity with the Republic?"

"No, no. The south is different. They have a different tradition there. Funnily enough, at one time I could actually see union with the Republic—a united Ireland. But now it's less and less a possibility."

He was reluctant to explain why, but then said, "The influence of the church is too strong there. Do you think any Ulsterman would accept the infallibility of the Pope?"

I said, "But they accept the infallibility of the Queen."

He laughed. He said, "And contraceptives on prescription! We'd never accept it."

Whenever the issue of union was raised, Ulstermen mentioned contraceptives.

"And there's the tribalism," Mehaffy said. "The tribalism starts in July, with the Orange parades. The Catholic parades are in August. And then, people who are the best of friends all year won't speak to each other. There's a lot of suspicion in the summer—a lot of tribal feeling—between Catholic and Protestant."

I said, "Is it possible to tell them apart?"

"There are people who say it is," Mehaffy said, and pointing to his eyes he went on, "For one thing, a Catholic's eyes are closer together."

We went out on deck and watched the cluster of lights at Larne drawing near. The mist liquefied the lights and made the harbor entrance dramatic. Mehaffy said that Ulstermen worked hard and had pride in their country. They hated people who tried to make jokes out of bombings and killings. This was while the ferry was making its way into Larne Harbour, and the lights were piercing the mist and illuminating the dark brown waterfront, the gleaming slates on the roofs, the oily lough to port. The wind groaned among the dockside cranes. Mehaffy said it never stopped raining here. The returning Ulster people who had been on the boat train stood silently at the rail, gazing upon Larne like mourners. Mehaffy said the trouble was, there was only one bloody topic of conversation, and who was really interested in that? The ferry horn echoed all over the harbor and lough, as if from a thousand empty holes in the night.

"I'm thinking of moving to England," Mehaffy finally said.

His tone was confessional, his voice a whisper. I was still staring at Larne and did not know what to say.

"I've got two kids," he said. "They're still young. They'll have a better chance there."

***

I expected formalities—customs and immigration—Larne was so foreign-seeming, so dark and dripping, but there was not even a security check; just a gangway and the wet town beyond it. I wandered the streets for an hour, feeling like Billy Bones, and then rang the bell at a heavy-looking house displaying a window card saying vacancies. I had counted ten others, but this one I could tell had big rooms and big armchairs.

"Just off the ferry?" It was Mrs. Fraser Wheeney, plucking at her dress, hair in a bun, face like a seal pup—pouty mouth, soulful eyes, sixty-five years old; she had been sitting under her own pokerwork, Rejoice in the Lord Alway, waiting for the doorbell to ring. "Twenty-one-fifteen it came in—been looking around town?"

Mrs. Wheeney knew everything, and her guest house was of the in-law sort—oppression and comfort blended, like being smothered with a pillow. But business was terrible: only one other room was taken. Why, she could remember when, just after the ferry came in, she would have been turning people away! That was before the recent troubles, and what a lot of harm they'd done! But Mrs. Wheeney was dead tired and had things on her mind—the wild storm last night.

"Thonder!" she thundered. "It opened up me hud!"

We were walking upstairs under a large motto— For God So Loved the World, and so forth.

"It gave me huddicks!"

The house was full of furniture, and how many floors? Four or five anyway, and pianos on some of them, and there was an ottoman, and a wing chair, and pokerwork scenes from the Old Testament, Noah possibly, and was that Abraham and Isaac? The whole house was dark and varnished and gleaming—the smell of varnish still powerful, with the sizzle of a coal fire. It was June in Northern Ireland, so only one room had a fire trembling in the grate.

"And it went through me neighbor's roof," she said, still talking about the storm, the thunder and lightning.

Another flight of stairs, heavy carpet, more Bible mottos, an armchair on the landing.

"Just one more," Mrs. Wheeney said. "This is how I get me exercise. Oh, it was turrible. One of me people was crying—"

Mirrors and antlers and more mottos and wood paneling, and now I noticed that Mrs. Wheeney had a mustache. She was talking about the reeyun —how hard it was; about breakfast at eeyut— but she would be up at sux; and what a dangerous suttee Belfast was.

Christ Jesus Came Into the World to Save Sinners was the motto over my bedstead, in this enormous drafty room, and the bed was a great slumping trampoline. Mrs. Wheeney was saying that she had not slept a wink all the previous night. It was the thunder and the poor soul in number eight, who was scared to death.

"It's funny how tired you get when you miss a night's sleep," she said. "Now me, I'm looking forward to going to bed. Don't worry about the money. You can give me the five pounds tomorrow."

The rain had started again and was hitting the window with a swishlike sleet. It was like being among the Jumblies, on a dark and rainy coast. They were glad to see aliens here, and I was happy among these strangers.

***

That first morning in Larne I discovered everything there was to know about Ulster rain—how it bucketed down from a sky no higher than a two-story house; how it was never the quicksilver of the Channel rain but always dark, striking at such a merciless slant that it penetrated everything; how it was cold and noisy and how it could be sharp enough to sting; how it never cleansed but rather blackened everything it struck. And no matter how often it rained, it was always so surprisingly cruel that everyone mentioned it. It was impossible to ignore. In this solemn rain-darkened place people regarded the rain as unfair.

It was the setting that was solemn, not the people. (But solemn was an understatement; Ulster looked black and devastated.) The people were curious—they stared, they smiled, they talked loud and still managed to be polite. The women, most of all, seemed to me remarkable—just the way they stood and spoke, their decisive gestures, their spirit. It was true of girls, as well. They seemed bold and friendly and able to take care of themselves.

These were judgments I made on the train from Lame to Belfast. It was a warm and rattly branch-line train, with bushes on the embankment beating against the door handles, and bog ferns sliding across the wet windows.

I was talking to Dick Flattery. "It's not a civil war," he was saying. "The Catholics and Protestants kill each other, but they haven't actually fought each other—"

Now who would have thought you could make such useful distinctions between "fight" and "kill"?

"—they kill each other singly," he went on, "but they fight the army and the police."

Flattery seemed intelligent and detached. He had left Belfast seven years before, for good; he was returning now only because his father was ill. He wasn't planning to stay. He was frightened by the violence.

"It started as a civil rights issue, ten or eleven years ago"—he meant the marches, the first one in Londonderry in 1969—"and then it got violent. No one talks about civil rights anymore."

He swiftly referred to Catholics as "they," and I knew he must be a Protestant. I asked him whether he could tell a Catholic from a Protestant.

"The Protestants are from Scottish stock," Flattery said. "They look Scottish."

We were traveling along Larne Lough—dark water, dark banks, and the dark rain falling fast. We were talking about poverty.

"There's always been unemployment here," he said. "There's not the same stigma attached to it that you find in England. People here aren't lost when they're on the dole. It's really a kind of chronic condition—groups of men standing on the street, doing nothing." He looked out the window. "God, I hate this place."

Now we were smack on the coast, leaving Whitehaven and swaying toward Carrickfergus on a narrow shelf just above the sea, and then,

The little boats beneath the Norman castle

The pier shining with lumps of crystal salt;

The Scotch Quarter was a line of residential houses

But the Irish Quarter was a slum for the blind

and the halt.

Louis MacNeice grew up in Carrickfergus, but it was not only his poem about that town that seemed to me clear-sighted—all his Ulster poems were vivid and true. And he wrote so well about the sea, sometimes as a tumultuous thing ("Upon this beach the falling wall of the sea...") and sometimes as a fussbudget ("That never-satisfied old maid, the sea / Rehangs her white lace curtains ceaselessly"), and ultimately in its cosmic and thalassic sense ("By a high star our course is set, / Our end is life. Put out to sea").

He had looked out to sea here, beyond Belfast Lough into the North Channel, and he had certainly been on this train, or else he could not have written, "Like crucifixes the gantries stand," seeing the shipyard at Belfast.

I knew at once that Belfast was an awful city. It had a bad face—moldering buildings, tough-looking people, a visible smell, too many fences. Every building that was worth blowing up was guarded by a man with a metal detector who frisked people entering and checked their bags. It happened everywhere, even at dingy entrances, at buildings that were not worth blowing up, and, again and again, at the bus station, the railway station. Like the bombs themselves, the routine was frightening, then fascinating, then maddening, and then a bore—but it went on and became a part of the great waste motion of Ulster life. And security looked like parody, because the whole place was already scorched and broken with bomb blasts.

It was so awful, I wanted to stay. It was a city which was so demented and sick that some aliens mistook its desperate frenzy for a sign of health, never knowing it was a death agony. It had always been a hated city. "There is no aristocracy—no culture—no grace—no leisure worthy of the name," Sean O'Faolain wrote in his Irish Journey. "It all boils down to mixed grills, double whiskies, dividends, movies, and these strolling, homeless, hate-driven poor." But if what people said was true, that it really was one of the nastiest cities in the world, surely then it was worth spending some time in, for horror interest?

I lingered a few days, marveling at its decrepitude, and then vowed to come back the following week. I had never seen anything like it. There was a high steel fence around the city center, and that part of Belfast was intact, because to enter it, one had to pass through a checkpoint—a turnstile for people, a barrier for cars and buses. More metal detectors, bag searches, and questions: lines of people waited to be examined so that they could shop, play bingo, or go to a movie.

There were still bombs. Just that week a new type of bomb had started to appear, a fire bomb made of explosive fluid and a small detonator; it exploded and the fiery fluid spread. And it was very easily disguised. These bombs had turned up in boxes of soap flakes and breakfast cereal and pounds of chocolates. One in a tiny bag had been left on a bus, and ten passengers had been burned and the bus destroyed. That was my first day in Belfast: DRIVER STEERS THROUGH BLAZE HELL TO SAVE LIVES displaced the Falklands news.

THREATS was a headline in every newspaper, with this message: If you know anything about terrorist activities—threats, murders, or explosions—please speak now to the Confidential Telephone—Belfast 652155.

I called the number, just to inquire how busy they were. But it was an answering machine, asking me for information about bombs and murder.

***

On the way to Coleraine and the coast I was in a train with about ten other people, two in each car—and some got out at Botanic Station, a mile from Central. I had never imagined Europe could look so threadbare—such empty trains, such blackened buildings, such recent ruins: DANGEROUS BUILDING—KEEP CLEAR. And bellicose religion, and dirt, and poverty, and narrow-mindedness, and sneaky defiance, trickery, and murder, and little brick terraces, and drink shops, and empty stores, and barricades, and boarded windows, and starved dogs, and dirty-faced children—it looked like the past in an old picture. And a crucifix like a dagger in one brute's lapel, and an Orange Lodge Widows' Fund badge in another's. They said that Ulster people were reticent. It seemed to me they did nothing but advertise, GOD SAVE THE POPE painted on one ruin, and on another, GOD SAVE THE QUEEN. And at Lisburn a large sign by the tracks said, WELCOME TO PROVOLAND. Everybody advertised, even urban guerrillas.

Fifteen minutes outside of Belfast we were in open country: pleasant pastures, narrow lanes, cracked farmhouses. But in such a place as Ulster the countryside could seem sinister and more dangerous than a crowded city, since every person on the move was exposed in a meadow or a road. The old houses all stuck up like targets, and it was hard to see a tree or a stone wall and not think of an ambush.

NO SURRENDER it said on the bridge at Crumlin. That town was-a low wet rabbit warren set amid cow parsley and wet fields. And then Lough Neagh, one of Ulster's great lakes, and the town of Antrim. Now the train had a few more sullen skinny faces on board. The towns were no more than labor depots, factory sites surrounded by the small houses of workers. But the factories were shut, the markets were empty, and the farmland looked flooded and useless. We came to Ballymena. I asked a man in the car if it was true that in Slemish near here ("where St. Patrick herded his sheep") children used to be kept in barrels to prevent them from fighting.

He said he did not know about that. His name was Desmond Corkery, and he guessed I was from the United States. He wished he were there himself, he did. He was after coming from Belfast, he was, and was there a more bloody miserable place in the whole of creation? And dangerous? Policemen and soldiers everywhere—and they talked about Lebanon and the flaming Falklands!

I guessed that Corkery was a Catholic. I asked him my usual question: How do you tell a Protestant from a Catholic? He said it was easy—it was the way a Protestant talked; he was better educated. "If he's using fancy words, you can be sure—"

And then Corkery became reflective and said, "Ah, but you're never really safe. You go into a bar, and you don't know whether it's a Protestant or Catholic bar. It can be frightening, it can, sure. You don't say anything. You call for your beer and you keep your mouth shut, and then you go."

But I began to think that it was an advantage to be a stranger here, not English, not Irish; and it was a great advantage to be an American. I never felt the Ulster people to be reticent or suspicious—on the contrary, it was hard to shut them up.

"And it was around here," Desmond Corkery was saying—we were past Ballymoney and headed into Coleraine; I had been encouraging Corkery to tell me a story of religious persecution—"just about here, that a bloody great team of footballers started to walk up and down the train. They were drinking beer and shouting, 'Bloody Fenian bastards!' Up and down the train. 'Bloody Fenian bastards!' Looking for Catholics, they were. One comes up to me and says straight out, 'You're a bloody Fenian bastard!'"

I shook my head. I said it was terrible. I asked him what he did then.

"I said no." Corkery looked grim.

"You told him you weren't a Catholic?"

"Sure I had to."

"Did he believe you?"

"I suppose he did," Corkery said. "He slammed the door and went roaring off."

We traveled in silence along the River Bann, and I thought how that denial must have hurt his pride, and it seemed to me that it was this sort of humiliation that made the troubles in Ulster a routine of bullying cowardice. It was all old grievances, and vengeance in the dark. That was why the ambush was popular, and the car bomb, and the exploding soap box, and the letter bomb. The idea was to deny what you stood for and then wait until dark to get even with the bugger who made you deny it.

***

It was drizzling at Coleraine, where I boarded a two-coach train to Portrush, a small seaside resort, emptier than any I had so far seen in Britain. But emptiness had given the place its dignity back: Portrush was rainswept and poor, and part of it was on a narrow peninsula with waves breaking on three sides.

The rain intimidated me for an hour or so. I had lunch with a man named Tubby Graham—there were only the two of us in the restaurant. Tubby was seventy and from Bangor. He liked motoring around, he said. "But I stay out of those ghetto places. Bushmills, for example—that's a completely Protestant town. And Derry's a Catholic one." He recommended Magilligan Point. Did I want a lift?

I said I had other plans, and when he was gone I sneaked down the beach and started walking toward Bushmills to see what a Protestant ghetto looked like. It was still raining, but I thought that if I kept walking, it might stop; and so it did, by the time I reached Dunluce Castle, three miles away. I walked along the sandy beach—not a soul in sight. And the cliffs were like battlements, made of white chalk with flint embedded in it. The only sounds were the gulls and the wind.

Farther on I climbed the cliff and walked through the wet grass to Bushmills. The more prosperous a place was in Ulster, the sterner and more forbidding it looked. Bushmills, rich on whiskey, was made of flat rocks and black slates and was cemented to the edges of straight roads. And now I saw what Tubby meant: the Orange Hall was large enough to hold every man in town.

I began to develop a habit of asking directions, for the pleasure of listening to them.

"Just a munnut," a man in Bushmills said. His name was Emmett; he was about sixty-odd and wore an old coat. He had a pound of bacon in his hand, and pressing the bacon to the side of his head in a reflective way, he went on.

"Der's a wee wudden brudge under the car park. And der's a bug one farder on—a brudge for trums. Aw, der used to be trums up and down! Aw, but they is sore on money and unded it. Lussun, ye kyan poss along da strond if the tide is dine. But walk on da odder side whar der's graws." He moved the bacon to his cheek. "But it might be weyat!"

"What might be wet?"

"Da graws," Mr. Emmett said.

"Long grass?"

"In its notral styat."

This baffled me for a while— notral styat —and then I thought: Of course, in its natural state!

Kicking through bracken, I pushed on and decided to head for the Giant's Causeway.

BOSWELL

: Is not the Giant's Causeway worth seeing?

JOHNSON

: Worth seeing? Yes; but not worth going to see.

I stayed on the coastal cliffs and then took a short cut behind a coastal cottage, where I was startled by a big square-faced dog. The hairy thing growled at me and I leaped to get away, but I tripped and fell forward into a bed of nettles. My hands stung for six hours.

The Giant's Causeway was a spectacular set of headlands made of petrified boilings and natural columns and upright pipe-shaped rocks. Every crack and boulder and contour had a fanciful name. This massive coastal oddity had been caused by the cooling of lava when this part of Ireland had oozed during a period of vulcanism. I walked along it, to and from Dunseverick Castle—"once the home of a man who saw the Crucifixion" (supposed to be Conal Cearnach, a roving Irish wrestler who happened to be in a wrestling match in Jerusalem the day Christ was crucified).

The basalt cliffs were covered with black slugs and jackdaws, and at seven in the evening the sun broke through the clouds as powerfully as a sunrise, striping the sea in pink. It was very quiet. The wind had dropped. No insects, no cars, no planes—only a flock of sheep baaing in a meadow on a nearby hilltop. The coves and bays were crowded with diving gulls and fulmars, but the cliffs were so deep, they contained the birds' squawks. The sun gleamed on the still sea, and in the west above Inishowen Head I could spy the blue heights of Crocknasmug. Yes, the Giant's Causeway was worth going to see.

It had been a tourist attraction for hundreds of years. Every traveler to Britain had come here to size it up. There had been tram lines out to it, as Mr. Emmett had told me in Bushmills. But the troubles had put an end to this, and now the coast had regained a rough primeval look—just one stall selling postcards, where there had been throngs of noisy shops.

This landscape had shaped the Irish mind and influenced Irish beliefs. It was easy to see these headlands and believe in giants. And now with people too afraid to travel much, the landscape had become monumental once again in its emptiness.

In pagan Ireland cromlechs had been regarded as giants' graves, and people looked closely at the land, never finding it neutral but always a worry or a reassurance. Hereabouts, there were caves that had been the homes of troglodytes. And it seemed to me that there was something in the present desolation that had made the landscape important again. So the Irish had been returned to themselves in this interval, and their fears restored to them, for how could they stand amid all this towering beauty and not feel puny?

Enough of these natural wonders, I thought, and at the hotel that night I buttonholed Mr. McClune from Ballywalter. "Oh, I like Ballywalter! Oh, yes, Ballywalter's pleasant, it is! We only get the odd bomb in Ballywalter!"

But he was worried about his sister.

"My suster is going down to Cavan this weekend. I don't unvy her. She's a Protestant girl, you see."

"Where is Cavan exactly?"

"In the Free State," Mr. McClune said.

I smiled; it was like calling Thailand "Siam," or Iran "Persia."

"A pig farm," he explained. "I mean to say, that's where my suster's staying. Now at this piggery there's a foreman. He is a member of the IRA."

"I see why you're worried," I said.

"But that could be a good thing, couldn't it?" he said. "It could keep her safe."

He meant that no one from the IRA would murder his sister, because a man from the IRA was employed by his sister's friends.

"We'll see what hoppens," he said.

We were having coffee at the Causeway Hotel, sitting in front of the fire. We were the only two guests. An Ulster conversation could be very restful. I was never asked personal questions. People talked, in general, on harmless subjects, unless I took the plunge. Mr. McClune, who was seventy-three and very wealthy—he had a Jaguar out front—said he had been to Australia and Canada and California.

"But I've never set futt on the continent of Europe," he said. "And I've got no desire to."

I said I was going to Londonderry.

"I haven't been to Derry for thirty-three years."

The next morning I walked back to Portrush. I passed a signboard indicating the way to Blagh. It was eight-fifteen and there were no cars on the road, and very quiet except for the birds—crows and finches. I kept walking, toward the train. It was green as far as I could see, and I could see twenty miles up the lovely coast.

16. The 10:23 to Londonderry

THE "TROUBLES"—that quaint Ultonian word for murder and mayhem—had something to do with the Irish differences between men and women here, I was sure. Why, look at this train to Derry. Nearly all the passengers were women, talking in normal voices. The few men on board were either shouting or whispering. The women were neither demure nor brassy; they were plain, frank, and a bit careworn. The men by contrast looked both jaunty and evasive, and they seemed to have nothing whatever to do. Women and men; duty and dereliction. Usually, though, there were only women around, and it seemed all the men had gone away to war—which in a sense was true.

There were always women and girls waiting for buses at crossroads. They were early risers—they walked, they even hitchhiked. I saw them along the coast of Londonderry, the shore of Lough Foyle, from Bellarena to Waterside. It was a country of active women, going shopping or to work, shoveling manure, driving tractors, riding trains.

People in Ulster traveled only when absolutely necessary, so it was significant that women traveled much more than men. Very often the only man on an Ulster bus was the driver. The wife was frequently the breadwinner, particularly in Derry: she was cheaper to employ and more dependable. I was never frightened in a train or a bus. They were seldom attacked, because they were full of women and children. The children could seem almost demented—nowhere in my life had I seen such excitable rowdy kids—but the women were noticeably friendly.

Women had assumed so many domestic and social duties here that a situation had arisen in which the men had no responsibilities. It was idleness as much as religion that made Ulstermen fighting mad. The proof that they were demoralized was the self-hatred in Ulster aggression. What was more self-destructive than a hunger strike? And wasn't it peculiar that the hunger strikers, far from being pacifists, were often very violent men who ought to have known that their captors were eager to be rid of them?

LET THEM DIE was scrawled on the bricks all over Orange Antrim, and ten hunger strikers had recently fasted until death in the Maze Prison. Then there was the so-called Dirty Protest. I could not imagine a preoccupied and overworked Irishwoman dreaming up this loony tactic. But it was easy to see how a maddened and self-hating Irishman might decide to act out his frustration by smearing the walls of his prison cell with his own shit, and refusing to wear clothes or have a bath or a haircut. "Take that!" they cried, and pigged it in those cells for months, innocently believing they were getting even with the British government by stinking to heaven.

I thought: This behavior is so strange, there's probably no name for it. But surely it was in a way profoundly childlike? This was how small children behaved when they felt angry and abandoned, when they wanted to be pitied.

At home these men were treated by their overworked womenfolk as if they were forever boys and burdens. The shame or guilt this dependency inspired made the men aggressive; but they had all the time in the world to ventilate their aggression. Religion was hardly a restraining force. Irish Catholicism was one long litany of mother imagery and mother worship, which only bolstered the odd family pattern; and Irish Protestantism seemed mainly to be based on a tribal memory of bloody battles, remembered with special relish in the all-male Orange Lodges.

I did not believe that it was religion as Christian doctrine that was at the bottom of it all. Ulster was a collection of secret societies, to which only men were admitted. The men dressed up, made rules, beat drums, swore oaths, invented handshakes and passwords, and crept into the dark and killed people. When they were done, they returned home to their women, like small children to their mothers.

Anyway, this was how it seemed to me in Londonderry.

***

From a distance, Derry was lovely and familiar. It looked like a mill town in Massachusetts—churches and factories piled up on both banks of a river, the same sort of tenements, the same sleepy air of bankruptcy. But up close, Derry was frightful.

Some Ulster towns inspired fear the way a man with an ugly face frightens a stranger: their scars implied violence. Derry was a scarred city of broken windows and barricades; it was patterned with danger zones, and every few blocks there was a frontier: the Waterside, the Bogside, the Creggan, and all the disputed territories among them. And it was possible to tell, from the damage and the slogans, that this was the principal killing ground of Ulster, FUCK THE POPE was scrawled at the Protestant end of the Craigavon Bridge, and at the Catholic end, FUCK THE QUEEN, and now and then corpses were found bobbing in the pretty River Foyle, which ran beneath the bridge. Derry was also the headquarters of the most violent of the nationalist factions, the Irish National Liberation Army. It made the IRA seem a party of dear old Paddys, twinkling and fiddling in the Celtic twilight. By contrast the INLA was heartless and unsentimental—eager to establish a reputation for cruel tenacity. It was always easy to spot an INLA slogan on a Derry wall: PEACE THROUGH SUPERIOR FIREPOWER.

The geniality and filth of Derry, and its state of siege, made the city an interesting muddle. Here were old geezers being shifty and jaunty in an Irish way, and over there the British soldiers were tense and watchful and stiff with starch. They crouched in doorways, peering, rifles poised, while the women gathered at Foyle's Pork Store (nothing but sausages and hams) and the men strolled into the betting shop. The soldiers meant business. They wore helmets and face masks and they traveled in armored cars; they moved singly, covering each other; all their vehicles had wire skirts beneath the chassis so that fire bombs could not be rolled under them.

While I was in Derry the annual Foyle Festival was on. It was one of the paradoxes of Ulster that for many life continued as usual, and that everything happened at once—the festival concert and talent show and bicycle race and cooking exhibit, along with mass frisking, soldier patrols, bomb threats, and arrests. There was the traditional football game and a festival art exhibition; and on the opening day there was a grotesque killing.

It was a typical Derry murder, the Derry men said: A phone call reported a cache of stolen goods; the policemen arrived and examined the stuff—a television, a fur coat, clocks, radios. One man lifted the television, and it blew up. It had been booby-trapped—the policeman was torn apart. "They was pieces of the bugger all over the place." Two other policemen were badly injured, one blinded. Then a mob gathered. The mob was hostile. They howled at the injured men, they jeered at the corpse. They obstructed the ambulance and booed when it broke through. And while the men were put onto stretchers, the screams were "Let the bastards die!"

Two men described this to me with approval—it was not an atrocity story to them; it was a success story. Their attitude was "Look at the horrible things they make us do to them—sure, it's tragic, but it's their fault. Won't they ever learn?"

Those same men, Tim Cronin and Denny McGaw, urged me to go to Donegal.

"Ah, Donegal's a lovely place, like," Cronin said. He was seventy-five years old, as white-faced as Yeats and with the same black-rimmed glasses. And he boasted, "Sure, I've been there almost a dozen times."

He was speaking of County Donegal, four miles from where we stood.

"So it's not violent, like Derry?" I said. Call it Londonderry and they thump you for being English.

"Derry's not violent," Mr. McGaw said. "Belfast—that's the violent place. They fight each other there. Aw, Derry's a lovely old town. Have you seen the fine walls?"

"But the police," I started to say.

McGaw pointed behind me. "A policeman was killed as he stood right there, not two weeks ago. Two men in a van came up that hill and shot him and rode on."

"So people do get killed?"

"Policemen and soldiers get shot, no doubt about it," Cronin said. "But we don't shoot each other. Ah, sure, stay out of Belfast—that's a bad place!"

Many people called Eire "the Free State," but they were not particularly sentimental about it. The IRA was of course banned in Eire, and Irish soldiers at the border post had a reputation for harassing Ulstermen, getting them to empty their pockets and turn out their suitcases. But that was not the main grievance Ulstermen had with Eire: the main grievance was money.

In a high-pitched voice of complaint, Paddy Dineen said, "Do you know what a beer costs in the Free State? Twenty-two shillings in the old money. Twenty-two shillings for a pint of beer!"

I said, "Is that an argument for staying British?"

"It is!" he said. "You can get a beer for half of that in Derry."

So much for Irish unity. But the notion of unity was very blurred by all the contending groups. In fact, the most nationalistic ones, like the IRA and the INLA, seemed to want to sweep both the British government and the Irish government away, and start all over again with the People's Republic of Ireland.

***

The hatred for British soldiers in Derry was extraordinary. Soldiers raided houses and, searching for guns, tore up floors and broke cupboards—they were vandals. Soldiers took money and personal effects, and did not give them back—they were thieves. Soldiers drove through the streets in Land-Rovers, shouting abuse at women and children—they were brutes. Soldiers timed their visits to Catholic areas to coincide with children getting out of school, in order to coax them into starting riots—they were criminal-minded. Soldiers shot innocent men—they were murderers.

This was how the Derry Journal portrayed the soldiers. And one day the paper announced, "The Army are now adopting Cromwellian tactics—destroying Catholic homes."

I stayed in a boarding house in Derry that was the Catholic counterpart to Mrs. Fraser Wheeney's pokerwork paradise in Lame. Instead of Bible mottos, Mrs. McCreadie had portraits of the Blessed Virgin Mary, and statuettes, too, the shape and size of Oscars. "Mothera God," Mrs. McCreadie was always saying while Joe, her only other lodger, told her what terrible things he had seen the night before in the Bogside.

They were great readers of the newspaper, these two. It was not the Falklands news. They were ignorant of the fact that British soldiers seemed about to recapture Port Stanley; but they knew every bit of the Ulster news, because the Ulster newspapers printed everything—rumors, hearsay, gossip, "witnesses saw," "it is believed," and sentences like "He alleged that the soldiers called him a 'Fenian bastard.'"

The most popular page at Mrs. McCreadie's was the one—or sometimes two—that contained the In Memoriams. It made me think that there was a sort of cult of death in Ulster. There certainly was one in Derry. It was not merely a list of obituaries, saying "So-and-so died yesterday"; it was a sheaf of tributes to people who had died years ago. "nth Anniversary," one read, and another, "15th Anniversary," and I saw one that commemorated the twenty-second anniversary of a parent's death. And with each tribute was a poem:

The mother is someone special, patient, kind and true,

No other friend in all the world will be the same as you.

Or,

Sweet are those memories, silently kept,

Of a mother I loved and will never forget.

Or,

We never fail to think of you

We never cease to care

We only wish we could go home

And find you sitting there.

There were hundreds of these in the paper every day, often a dozen or so to the same person, invoking the prayers of St. Columba—the sixth-century Irish missionary—and "Mary, Queen of Ireland." The Virgin Mary had been elevated to the Irish throne. Mothera God, as Mrs. McCreadie said.

There were always tributes to men who had been killed in the Irish cause. This one was typical:

4th Anniversary

Vol. Dennis Heaney

Shot dead by'S.A.S. on 10th June, 1978

"Life springs from death; and from the graves

of patriot men and women spring living nations."

Proudly remembered by [a long list of names]

Sacred Heart of Jesus, have mercy on him

St. Columba, pray for him

Mary Queen of Ireland, pray for us

One day I left Mrs. McCreadie's and kept walking. It was a lovely morning—clear skies and warm sunshine. I walked on a boggy path along the River Mourne, which was the border between Eire and Ulster—though you would never have known it. The grass was just as spectacularly green on this bank as on that one. I walked ten miles, and the weather changed. The rain came down, flattening the buttercups in the fields. So I caught a bus into Strabane.

Strabane was said to be the poorest town in Europe—it had the highest murder rate for its size, and the highest unemployment rate, and the fewest pigs, and the dimmest prospects. It was smack on the border, and it had the curiously unfinished look of a frontier town—like a house with one wall missing. It was sorry-looking, with men propped against storefronts, whistling, and a number of cracked windows. But it was not noticeably more decrepit than other towns I had seen in Ulster. I considered staying the night, but the Control Zone and all the soldiers and police complicated the mildest stroll. And when I thought it over, I decided that I had seen few places on earth more depressing than Strabane in the rain.

The day after I left Strabane a man walked out of a motor accessory shop where he worked. He was thirty-nine, a member of the Ulster Defence Regiment—a hated paramilitary force that had come into existence when the Protestant B-Specials were disbanded. A car drew up; the man was shot four times; the car sped away. The man died immediately. He was the one hundred and twenty-third UDR man to be gunned down since the regiment was formed ten years before.

Every town and village was deserted by six or six-thirty, and it was eerie, because the summer evenings were often sunlit and long, and the desertion was obvious.

"There's a dread of trouble," Sean McLaughlin said. He lived in Omagh, where I went after Strabane. Omagh was also funereal. But Sean's solution was to get out of town on a bus to Belcoo, on the border of Eire. There was a fleadhceoil being held there that weekend—a "flah," he called it—a festival of fiddles and flutes and concertinas. Sean got on the bus, with only his fiddle for baggage. He said that three days of drinking and singing in Belcoo would put him right.

That was the real paradox of Ireland. The dimple-chinned fiddler heading down the road to the "flah" at Belcoo—as warm-hearted and unsuspicious an Irishman as ever plucked a shamrock; and on the same bus as Sean (though I did not speak to him until we got to Enniskillen), the gray-browed Morris Grady Smith, who also knew Belcoo.

"I was driving out of Belcoo towards Garrison in the van." (Morris worked for the Public Works Department in Enniskillen.) "There were eight of us in the van, and I was at the wheel as usual. Suddenly there was a blue flash right in front of me. The windscreen burst open and all the glass fell on me. It was an explosion, and then there was shots! I kept driving, though I felt some pain in my arm. I was shot seven times, but the bullets just passed through my arm—not one of them struck a bone!"

He offered to show me his scars, but I said that I believed his story. He kept talking.

"Three of my men were dead—hit with small slugs from an M-Sixty rifle. One of the men was a Catholic. See, they were shooting across the border—that Belcoo-to-Garrison road passes right along the border. They must have mistook our van for an army vehicle and thought we were soldiers. We were just men with shovels, fixing the potholes in the road."

***

Someday all cities will look like this, I had thought in Belfast; and the same thought occurred to me in Derry and now in Enniskillen. The center of these places was a Control Zone, with an entrance and exit. All cars and all people were examined for weapons or bombs, and the tight security meant that inside the Control Zone life was fairly peaceful and the buildings generally undamaged. It was possible to control the flow of traffic and even to prevent too many people from entering. It was conceivable that this system would in time be adapted to cities that were otherwise uncontrollable. It was not hard to imagine Manhattan Island as one large Control Zone, with various entrances and exits; Ulster suggested to me the likely eventuality of sealed cities in the future.

In Enniskillen each car in the control zone was required to have at least one person in it. If a car was left empty or unattended, a warning siren was sounded and the town center cleared. If the driver was found, he was given a stiff fine; if no driver claimed the car, the Bomb Squad moved in. This system had greatly reduced the number of car bombs in Enniskillen (only ten miles from the border). The last car bomb had gone off two years ago. The nicer part of Church Street was blown to smithereens—an appropriate Gaelic word—but it was a pardonable lapse, the soldiers said. That wired-up car seemed to have a person in it: How were they to recognize the difference between an Ulsterman and a dummy?

Willie McComiskey, who described himself as a fruiterer, told me that Enniskillen had been pretty quiet lately—no bombs, not many fires, only a few ambushed cars.

"What they do, see, is they go to isolated farms near the border. They take the farmer and stand him up and shoot him."

He seemed rather emotionless as he spoke, and he described how the men were sometimes murdered in front of their families—the wife and children watching.

I asked him how he felt about it.

He said in the same even voice, "Why, you wouldn't do it to a dog."

"So what do you think of these gunmen?"

"I hate them," he said. He began to smile. What absurd questions I was asking! But he was uncomfortable stating the obvious. Here, such attitudes were taken for granted.

He said, "We're eighty percent British here. We couldn't have union with southern Ireland. A Protestant would have no chance. He wouldn't get a job."

So McComiskey was a Protestant; that was his emphasis.

"But I don't think the IRA want union now. They don't know what they do want."

From Enniskillen I walked south to Upper Lough Erne, one of the two enormous lakes here in County Fermanagh. The sun came out as I walked, and a milkman I met said, "The weather's being kind to us." There was no sound on these country lanes except the odd squawk of a crow. I found a hotel near the village of Bellanaleck, and now the sun was shining on the green woods and the lake. It was a sixty-room hotel. I thought I was the only guest, but the next day at breakfast I saw two Frenchmen in rubber waders—fishermen.

"I have to check you for bombs," Alice, the room girl, said.

She followed me to my room and then peered uneasily into my knapsack.

"I'm not sure what a bomb looks like," she said.

"You won't find one in there," I said. "It's just old clothes—"

"And books," she said. "And letters."

"No letter bombs."

She said, "I have to check all the same."

I went for a walk. This was deep country. The pair of lakes went halfway across this part of Ulster. People spent weeks on cabin cruisers; Germans mostly. There were no English tourists here anymore.

"The English started to believe what they saw on television," Bob Ewart said. "They actually thought all that stuff about bombs and murders was true!"

He himself was from Nottingham.

"I've lived here fourteen years and I've yet to see an angry man."

That night the movie on television was The Invasion of the Body-Snatchers. I watched it with the Irish hotel workers. It was a horror movie about the world being taken over by alien germs. The Irishmen said it was frightening and of course went to bed happy. Then it struck me that a horror movie could enjoy a great popular success only if its frights were preposterous—like someone saying "Boo!" The ultimate horror was really what was happening in many Ulster towns: bombs, murders, peoples' hands being hacksawed off, or men having their kneecaps shot off as a punishment for disloyalty, or the tar-and-feathering of young girls for socializing with soldiers. Because this was the truth—unlike the Hollywood monster movie—it was worse than frightening: it was unbearable.

And the next day a man named Guilfoyle told me there was quite a bit of rural crime in the border areas—cattle-maiming. I had no idea what he was talking about. He explained that to take revenge on farmers, some of the republican country folk sneaked into the pastures at night and knifed off the cows' udders.

***

On my map of Lough Erne I saw there was a hotel at Carrybridge, about four miles away by water. The man who let me have a rowboat said, "It's a fair old pull. Your arms are going to be screaming." This was John Joseph Skerry, who hadn't rented out a rowboat for years. He waved to me as I rowed away, down the narrow lake, to have lunch at Carrybridge. I saw herons and terns and curlews and a circling flock of swans. My boat was a shallow dinghy—two hours it took me to row the four miles, and I arrived at the hotel at about three o'clock. "We just closed," the girl at the bar said as I entered. "I can't sell you anything." But I was glad to have a chair. I went into the lounge, where a television was on—a tennis match. "You can't sit here if you're not a resident," a young man said. "You'll have to leave." I went outside and saw that the hotel was the whole of Carrybridge. This was the middle of nowhere, on the lake! It was beautiful, but I was hungry. Then it started to rain. And there among the yellow irises and the cows, on the bridge at Carrybridge, it said, no surrender—1690 and on a pillar, no pope here. I cast off and rowed four miles back, thinking: This is just a row on an Irish lake for me, but it's their whole life.

***

There was an army checkpoint down the road at Derrylin. On the way to see it I stopped in local inns, in villages so small they were not on any map. The inns were full of men and boys, and on summer evenings places like Crocknacreevy looked and smelled like Rhodesia, a tough and beautiful colony in the dust.

"They're not farmers," an innkeeper told me. "They're all on the dole. They're not bad, but they've been brought up to behave like cretins. They chuck their cigarette ends on the carpet and grind them in with their boot heels. Farmers don't stay up until all hours drinking. They work hard for their money, so they save it."

The army checkpoint was just a barrier manned by six soldiers, but this road went straight to the border. The soldiers would not talk to me.

Don't talk politics, don't talk religion, people said; but I thought: Ridiculous! What was the point in traveling around Ulster if you avoided those two subjects?

A Protestant named Mortimer gave me a lift and said, "The army are very rough when they first arrive in an area. Those men you saw are paratroopers. They've just got here—that's why they look so nasty. After three or four weeks they'll be a bit more polite."

I asked him whether they harassed people, as the papers reported.

"Aye. They do. Especially if you have some connection with Irish politics—or if they think you have. They come to your house at six in the morning. They don't knock you up—they kick your door off its hinges. Sometimes they tear the place apart."

I said it sounded fairly severe.

He smiled. "It's worse when they take you in. There are lots of stories. Even if they're half-true, they're very bad."

"Have you been arrested?" I asked.

"They don't have to arrest you," Mortimer said. "They take you in."

"And then?"

"Beat you up."

I said, "Maybe you'd be better off without the army?"

"I wouldn't say that. But it can be pretty rough with them." He thought a moment and said, "We get more trouble from the UDR than the army."

"Who's 'we'?"

He said, "Everyone."

I took a bus in an easterly direction to Dungannon. The hills were steep and green and very close together in this part of Tyrone, and in the small town of Clogher they were like green wrinkles on the face of the earth, the ridges of hills, one after another.

Every town looked as though it was expecting trouble at any moment. All the police, the Royal Ulster Constabulary, were armed and alert and seemed nervous. They knew that the suddenness of violence was peculiar to this sort of piecemeal siege: everything happened in seconds.

I made the mistake in Dungannon of going repeatedly through the same checkpoint turnstile. "You again," the policeman's expression said. "Make up your mind—stay in or stay out." He seemed irritated, like a man who has to keep getting up to unlock a door. The town center was completely sealed off and surrounded by police marksmen with automatic rifles.

On the way to Portadown in North Armagh I sat in a bus filled with women and children. It was always the case. The children were hyperactive, jumping on the seats and yelling. One kicked at the window.

"Missus," the driver kept saying, "take that chayld awee from that wunder."

The villages all followed the same pattern: a church, a post office, a manor house, an Orange Hall, a cluster of tiny cottages. There were no strangers here, no city slickers moving in and fixing up the cottages, as they did in Dorset and Devon; and no people who had come here to retire and grow roses, as they did in Sussex and Kent. The old people in Ulster villages had been born in those same villages. They did not move to the coast. They did not move at all. This was a society in which everyone stayed put.

***

Where was the railway station? I asked people in Portadown. They said: Over there, over there. But there was no station; I couldn't see it. Over there, they said. Then Mr. Cleary said, "It's right here."

I could not see it, I said.

"Aye," he said. "It got blew up four months ago. But this is where it used to be."

It had been bombed one Sunday night. Mr. Cleary had heard the explosion himself in his kitchen. He asked where I was going.

"Newry," I said.

"Ah, that's all right then. The train doesn't go to Newry."

He meant I need not have troubled myself. Anyway, the train was gone. It went to Dundalk in the Republic: it didn't stop for twenty-five miles.

Why didn't the train stop anywhere? I asked.

"No necessity. No one goes to Newry."

Sean O'Faolain had written of being in Portadown in the 1940s and asking a man, "What is the outstanding characteristic of this town—a typical Ulster town—compared with any typical southern town?" And the man had replied, "I'll tull ye. No Jew ever made a living here or in Ballymena."

I told this to Mr. Cleary and he said, "Aye. That's true, right enough."

There was no quick way out of Portadown, and it was a dreary place. I wanted to go to Newry and then Kilkeel and continue up the coast. People said: Don't go to Newry—it's bandit country there, sure it is. I'm after coming there meself and I'm surprised I'm still alive, like.

"Aw, if they'd listened to Joe Gibson we'd still have a railway station," a man named McGrane told me. "But they didn't believe him. He's daft, see. 'I seen the kyar!' he says. He was trying to warn them. But he's sort of screwy. They just laughed, and then bang!"

"Who did it?" I said.

"No one took credit for it. Could have been anyone," McGrane said. "Take your pick. We've got the IRA, the Provos, the INLA, and Provisional Sinn Fein. There's the UDA, the UVF, the UFF, the Tartan Army, and Paisley's Third Force. There's also common criminals. There's people cashing in on the violence. There's bloody kids. There's too many, if you ask me."

McGrane was against union with the Republic: "If a woman don't want any more kids, the priest will come round and tell her not to take any conthra-conthra-conthrathep—" He winced, trying to say the word.

I said, "I get the point."

Thomas B. Mules was very fat and had small close-set eyes. He had stopped smoking only a few months before, because he could no longer afford it. He had gained forty pounds and now weighed two hundred and thirty.

Mr. Mules said, "Don't go to Newry."

"Why not?"

"Tis a Provo town," he whispered, edging nearer.

"So?"

"Talking English," he said. "Asking questions," he said. "Dey'll take ye for an SAS man," he said. "Dey'll cull ye."

"Cull" seemed somehow worse than "kill." It was like being noiselessly dispatched forever.

Mr. Mules said, "Go to Newcastle."

So I went to Newcastle, via Gilford and Banbridge, on more country buses ("Missus, please take yer chayld...").

All municipal buildings were protected in an unusual way. They were not merely fenced in—they were enclosed in cages that occasionally rose over the top of the buildings. They had elaborate gates and barbed wire, and the mesh was very fine. They made the police stations and telephone exchanges and all the other likely targets bombproof. It was strange to see such heavy security in what were otherwise sleepy country towns, and also strange—in the face of such ugly fortifications—to be told "Aye, but it's very quiet here, really."

In Banbridge I wrote in my diary: Over a week in N. Ireland pestering people with questions and I still haven't met a real bigot.

Because Banbridge was on the main road from Eire to Belfast, there were a number of checkpoints just south of town. Some were manned by the jug-eared volunteers of the Ulster Defence Regiment ("Open yer boot—") and some by the Royal Ulster Constabulary ("Have you ever been in the North before?"), and some by British soldiers ("Carrying a gun?").

On the country bus to Newcastle I kept glimpsing the Mourae Mountains. They were sudden and unusual in the gentle landscape. Farther east the land was stony, and the mountains, which had looked blue from Katesbridge, were pale green, and bare, smooth, bulgy, and undulant, like a naked giantess lying in a green sleeping bag.

Newcastle lay beneath the high peak of Slieve Donard, and it was empty. In pretty places like this I got the full flavor of Ulster desolation: no one at the beach or in the park; no one promenading on the Promenade; no parked cars, because there was a bomb law against it; no one in the shops; and only one couple in the Chinese restaurant. Bright and bleak, the sunlit ghost towns of the Ulster coast!

Scrawled on a building in Newcastle was the slogan VIVA ARGENTINA. It was the first time in my traveling that I had seen a graffito in support of Argentina in the Falklands War. The irony was that the day I saw it was the day the British army entered Port Stanley, forcing the Argentines to surrender. The next morning's newspapers all had the same headline: VICTORY!

17. The 15:53 to Belfast

THE BRITISH VICTORY in the Falklands was not celebrated in County Down. The people I spoke to were perplexed and bitter. "Too many men had to die for that," Mr. Hackett told me in Newcastle. "Yes, I saw the papers," Constance Kelly said in Castlewellan, "but we're too busy with our own troubles to take an interest in that pile of rocks in the South Atlantic." And a man named Flannagan in Downpatrick said, "What about the lads getting killed here? There was a bomb in town not long ago, but none of the English papers printed a story saying, 'Tim Flannagan took a light head and is far from well at the moment.'"

I caught the school bus—it was the only one at that early hour—and went to Castlewellan with the yelling boys and the womanly girls of St. Malachy's. I was hardly thirty miles from Belfast, but instead of heading straight there, I took a roundabout route on the coastal side of the Ards Peninsula. I was making for Bangor and the train to Belfast. It was a June day of suffocating dampness, the brown sky like a mass of raveled wool, threatening rain.

Walking out of Downpatrick, where I had just met Tim Flannagan, I was thinking about the Falklands and the attitude here. What about us? the Ulstermen said. Catholic and Protestant alike objected to the attention given to the far-off Falklands and their seventeen hundred inhabitants (who, at that time, were not even full citizens of Britain). I came to a war memorial on the outskirts of the town, with a slab inscribed with the lines:

They shall not grow old, as we that are left grow old:

Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.

At the going down of the sun and in the morning

We will remember them.

What fascinated me was that the verse portrayed the advantage of dying young—being spared the fatigue and weakness of old age. The poet, Laurence Binyon, was English, but this was a very Irish sentiment. It seemed to me that the real problem in Ulster—and the reason there were so many bloody killings—was that everyone believed in an afterlife.

It was nine miles to Strangford. I walked to Milestone Seven, and then the rain started. I did not mind the rain, but the thunder growl worried me. I was on an open road between flat fields—no village, no trees, no shelter. I decided to hitchhike.

This was Ulster, and hitchhikers here often hijacked the car and kicked the driver into the road (the bombers and gunmen nearly always used stolen cars), and yet I got a ride from the second car that passed.

Mr. Hurley was a Strangford man. It was a mixed community, he said, and he was proud to say they all worked together.

"Of course, there's extremist groups operating in the area," Mr. Hurley said. "And there's political parties. And there's clubs and lodges. Now out of all that lot, you'd think one of them would reflect my thinking, wouldn't you? But none of them does. I think if we had better leadership we'd get somewhere."

He said he had worked in London as a plumber's mate.

"Three years in London and for the whole of that time no one asked me my religion. That's what I liked about London."

Strangford was about five streets—fifty families, no more—and a ferry landing. I crossed the harbor mouth on a ferry to the neat and rather formal village of Portaferry. It was unusual in Ulster to find a village with no graffiti, no bomb damage, no broken windows, no blasted buildings; and Portaferry was almost like that—the only sign of fanaticism was a blasted church.

"It's a wee pretty little town," a man said to me. "You should see it with the sun shining in the square."

It was still raining very hard. He said Portaferry was famous for its offshore whirlpools.

I said I was not staying here but was going on to Portavogie.

"I'm after coming from Portavogie meself," he said. "And how are ye getting there?"

I said I would either walk or hitchhike.

"I'll take ye," he said. "I have to go home for me lunch."

His name was Cosmo Shields, and he said his bus was just around the corner. I was surprised to see that this was no euphemism: a big empty bus was parked on the next road. This was his bus, he said. He had done his morning run from Newtonards and now he was going to lunch. He took the bus home, because he had an afternoon run up to Kirkcubbin and Belfast. Not long ago there had been sixteen buses on this peninsula, but as the drivers had died—"Most of them took heart attacks"—the buses were phased out.

It was not that people had cars nowadays, Cosmo Shields said. It was that they did not have any money and it was not safe to travel.

He had been lucky, he said. He had been driving for thirty-three years—he had driven double-deckers down these country lanes. But in all that time, making two trips a day into Belfast, he had had trouble only twice: both times he was stoned and the windows broken in the Short Strand district.

"Aye, but it wasn't me they was throwing stones at. They'd have thrown stones at the bus if you'd been driving it. It's the bus, see. Government property." He drove with his elbows on the wheel. He was a stocky man in his late fifties. He had not collected any fare from me. This was not a service run, he said. "Mind you, I've had plenty of trouble with drunks. And children."

I said, "The kids seem very jumpy."

"They're more destructful than ever they were!" Mr. Shields said. "They've got destruction in their heads. Aye, there's talk. People are worried about Ulster children nowadays." Mr. Shields swung his whole body over, and taking his eyes off the road for five dramatic seconds, he said, "Aye, the wee kids see what's going on."

We were just then entering Portavogie. It was attractive in the same way as Portaferry—no bomb craters, no hysteria, and an air of normality. High-sided trawlers were moored at the fish docks, discharging cratefuls of herrings and prawns.

Cosmo Shields was still grunting darkly. I guessed he was thinking about the destructive kids.

He said, "Aye, the way things are going, it'll hoppon soon, like."

"Pardon?"

"The end of the world." He was nodding with certainty now. "Aye, I reckon the end of the world is not far off"—

And in the same breath:

"—shall I take you up to Ballywalter?"

***

It was my walking and hitching up that coast to Bangor that made me modify my opinion of Ulster. Part of the society was wild, and religious mania only made that wildness worse—martyr-mad and eager to chant "Anti-Christ! Anti-Christ!" (as Doctor Paisley's congregation had done to the Pope in England just a few weeks before). It was an old society, with a long memory and no nose at all for the future—1690 was considered just yesterday by people who were not sure whether they had their busfare home tonight.

I had no idea where the cruelty came from. Tennyson said that Irish cruelty was due to a lack of imagination, but other writers had put it down to a strain of anarchy and an evasion of moral worries. The Irish could be glad about the idea of Ireland, but Ulster was a nebulous thing—and wasn't it really nine counties and not six? The people of Ulster, neither Irish nor British, felt lonely and left behind.

It was a society of hard workers who were unemployed. It was a beautiful country that was impossible to live in. It was a society that still had real peasants and real skinflint duchesses, pig farmers, and dowager countesses. And, amazingly in a country where roots went very deep, it had the highest rate of emigration in the world—especially lately: almost 140,000 people had left Ulster in the ten years between 1971 and 1981. It was, most of all, a society with tribal instincts—tribal warfare, tribal kinships, and (common among tribal people) a sense of isolation that inspired both suspicion and generosity, particularly toward strangers. They said, "Fuss is better than loneliness."

When I hitchhiked, I was picked up. When I asked questions, they were nearly always answered. I saw signs of violence, but I never felt I was in physical danger. I liked the Ulster curiosity—so different from the English narrowness and fear. I was dressed like a tramp or a bandit, but I was made to feel welcome. "Come home with me and have some lunch!" It was not until I visited Ulster that I received that invitation. I made my way up the bouldery coast to Millisle and walked to Donaghadee, which was rainswept and empty. "You should have been here three weeks ago," I was told in Donaghadee. "The sun was shining. It was lovely and warm. Still. Not to worry. Come in and get your feet up. I'll put the kettle on."

Most of these coastal places were only incidentally seaside resorts. They were small towns with the Irish Sea splashing against them and taking the sewage away and drowning the odd cat. Down there was an empty amusement arcade, an empty café, a fish-and-chip shop, a few broken benches, and a rocky foreshore covered with black seaweed—maybe kelp, maybe tar: it made no difference; no one swam.

"Come back in a few weeks," I was told.

"Is that when the season starts?"

"No. Just the one day. Orange Day."

"I'll make a note in my diary," I said.

"The twalth."

***

I walked via Groomsport to Bangor. Bangor resembled a certain kind of English coastal town. It was a little like Bexhill and a little like Dawlish; it was elderly and respectable and cliffy, and in a tawdry-genteel way it had a comic air of pretension that was rare in Ulster. But that was at the better end of Bangor. At the other end it was just as desolate and friendly as everywhere else. Some of Bangor served as a refuge for the fairly well-off, the businessmen and professional people who worked in Belfast but could not bear to live there. So Bangor was safer but a great deal duller than any other town its size in Ulster, including Newcastle, which did no more than gape like an oyster.

It was a sign of Bangor's relative quietness that there was no security check at the railway station. I took the 15:53 one day—all the trains went west; Bangor was the end of the line—and after a few miles it was like any suburb in England with old and new semidetached houses, rose gardens, and high hostile fences. Now I was passing along the southern part of Belfast Lough, and at Carnalea I could see the towns of Carrickfergus and Whitehead across the bay. I had almost completed my circular tour of Ulster.

The rain came down. In places there were meadows to the sea. Helen's Bay railway station was designed by Lord Dufferin as a mock fortification, with arrow slits in the towers and castellated walls—the Irish aristocracy seemed to me more foolish and artless than the peasantry. It was here in Helen's Bay and farther on at Cultra and Marino that people said, "I've never seen a riot nor heard a bomb, and I don't think I ever shall."

We passed Holywood and the large army depot, and then the gantries and cranes of the shipyard, which meant we were near Belfast, the old horror.

It was a city of drunks, of lurkers, of late risers. It smelled of wet bricks and burning coal. It stank. It had a sort of nightmare charm. When the rain came down in Belfast, it splashed through the roof and spattered through the window glass and poured into your soul. It was the blackest city in Britain, and the most damaged.

Belfast had a tourist bureau. Don't be afraid, was their message. I liked the blarney in their brochure:

No coward soul is mine.

No trembler in the world's storm-troubled sphere

These lines by Emily Bronte (daughter of an Ulsterman) are often quoted to describe the spirit of Belfast. Visitors, having heard only news of the city's political troubles, are invariably surprised when they see the citizens' "business as usual" briskness and the positive signs of achievement...

But the Brontë poem ("Last Lines") was about the love of God and "Heaven's glories" and faith "arming me from fear." Trust in God and you'll be safe in Belfast!

The achievement, I supposed, was that after such a battering, the city still stood; after so many streets had been torn up and so many bombs thrown, there were still buses running; after so many windows broken, there were still windows intact. Life went on, but how could it not? Forty percent of the Ulster population lived in this city, and most of the remaining industry was here. But the outlook was grim. The shipyard, Belfast's largest employer, was said to be laying off four thousand men. "That's when the real trouble will start," a hard-faced man named Muncaster said to me. "The British government's been protecting their 'workers.' But what happens when they don't have any more workers?"

Muncaster—"Call me Jack"—was a real Belfast toughie. The city either destroyed a person or else made him merciless. The people of Belfast—most of them—suffered from what journalists had begun calling "compassion fatigue." They had seen so much misery and heard so many explosions and cries for help, they hardly blinked.

"What do I think of the bombers?" Muncaster said. "I think they're boring. When I hear a bomb go off I just look at my watch. I look at the time—I don't know why—and then I walk away. And I feel a little safer after a bomb, because there probably won't be another one that day. But God, it's boring!"

It was true—a dangerous society was frightening, and then inconvenient, and then annoying, and then maddening, and ultimately a bore. All the security checks! All the metal detectors! All the body searches and friskings and questions! I was being put through a security check one day and the police officer, a woman, shrieked and jumped away from my knapsack, crying, "Feathers! Feathers!" and shaking her hands. "Get them away from me!"

They were the hackles of a dead pheasant I had found down at Dundrum Bay.

In Belfast I stayed in a dirty hotel with a damp interior and wallpaper that smelled of tobacco smoke and beer and the breakfast grease. But there was no security check here. I had been searched in Enniskillen, a town that hadn't had a bomb in years; and I would have been searched at the grand Europa Hotel in Belfast—it was surrounded by a high barbed-wire fence and had sentries and guard dogs. The tourists and journalists stayed at the Europa—it was a good target for bombs. But no one of any importance stayed at Mooney's Hotel.

I called it Mooney's because it greatly resembled Mrs. Mooney's flophouse in James Joyce's story "The Boarding House." Our Mrs. Mooney also had an enormous florid face and fat arms and red hands, and she catered to traveling salesmen and drifters. The carpets were ragged, the wallpaper was peeling, there were nicks all over the woodwork. But I was free there, and I would not have been free in an expensive hotel; and I also thought that in this grubby place I was out of danger. It was Belfast logic, but it was also a pattern of life that I was sure would become more common in the cities of the future.

The bar at Mooney's was busy all night, filling the whole building with smoke and chatter.

"What time does the bar close?" I asked on my first night.

"October," a drinker told me, and laughed.

One day in Belfast I saw a poster advertising "the world première" of a play called The Interrogation of Ambrose Fogarty. It sounded political—that was promising; and the author, Martin Lynch, was a local man. It was being staged at the Lyric Players Theatre near the Botanical Gardens and Queens University. I splashed through the rain to buy a ticket—my shoes had been wet for three days! Rain was general all over Ireland, falling on every part of the dark central plain, softening the Bog of Allen and blackening Belfast still more.

It was still raining the night of the world première. But the play drew a good crowd, and I thought afterward I could not have seen a better play. It summed up the mood I had detected in Ulster—farce and tragedy, one turning into the other, one sometimes indistinguishable from the other.

Ambrose Fogarty, a Catholic from the Falls Road, is picked up on suspicion by a British soldier and taken to a police station for questioning. He is kept for three days and given the third degree. Fogarty is innocent; the British soldier is a lecherous, toffee-nosed brute who is contemptuous of Ulster and Ulstermen; two of the policemen are ineffectual; the rest are sadists and bigots. There is another suspect, Willy Lagan, but he is a fool—drunken, feeble-minded, and plucking a guitar; he is as comic as Fogarty is pious.

It was a play about persecution and torture. In places it was crudely written, but it seemed to confirm all the stories I had heard about the intimidation of suspects. Ambrose is asked to sign a confession that he is a member of the IRA and that he has taken part in an armed bank robbery. He refuses to sign—he denies everything. So he is threatened. He still refuses. At last, he is savagely beaten, kicked, choked, and his arm nearly twisted out of its socket. But all the police have succeeded in doing is giving a rather pleasant young man a grievance. The play ends with Fogarty political in a platitudinous way.

The violence was eased somewhat by the presence of the second suspect, Willy, who provided the comic relief by singing off key, appearing to cooperate and then collapsing, pulling faces, and saying everything twice. And he looked ridiculous: he was dressed in a zoot suit and a loud tie and had slicked-down hair—straight out of the American fifties. But he was too ridiculous, and really wasn't it all preposterous—Ambrose too innocent, Willy too bizarre?

"What do you think?" I was asked afterward by a lady in the foyer, as I was having a pint of Guinness.

I thought: It's loaded. And why were such plays always about innocent people? Why not make Fogarty an IRA man? After all, there were enough of them around, shooting people in the back and muttering Sinn Fein, "Ourselves Alone."

But I said, "Very interesting. But I'm an alien, so naturally I have a few questions."

"Why don't you ask them? The author's standing right behind you."

Martin Lynch was about thirty. I was immediately struck by his physical resemblance to his main character, Fogarty. I said that I had heard about such interrogations, but how true was his play?

"It's about me," he said. "I was arrested and held for three days. They beat me up. They tried to make me sign a confession. All that in the play—it's true."

"The Willy character is dramatically right, I think," I said; but I meant he was too convenient and preposterous.

"Want to meet him?" Lynch said. He called a man over.

This one was older and uglier than Willy Lagan, but there was no doubting that he was the original. He pulled a face, he winked at me, and started to sing. He wore a white satin necktie and a black shirt and a flashy zoot suit. He got onto his knees and made monkey noises; he snatched at my hand.

"We were in prison together," Lynch said, smiling at the man's antics. "Well, it's just like in the play. If he hadn't been there it would have been unbearable. I'm really grateful to him."

The man made affectionate monkey noises and rolled his eyes; and now it was impossible to tell at what point the play ended and the lives of these men began.

It seemed to me a healthy sign that there were such plays being produced, but it was a play about a deranged society. I kept wishing that it had been a play about a real bomber, because it was a society in which everyone talked about persecution but no one took any blame.

No one admitted to crime in Ulster. The most they said was "Look what they make us do!" It was as if all the street violence were imaginary or else rigged by soldiers who (so it was said in Derry) coaxed children into starting riots. It was slippery, shadowy, tribal; it was all stealth. It was a folk tradition of flag-waving and the most petty expression of religious bigotry west of Jerusalem: the Linfield Football Club of Belfast had a clause in its constitution stipulating that no Catholic could ever play on its team. Apart from the bombing, it was not public crime anymore. It was sneaking ambushes and doorstep murders ("I've got something for your father") and land mines in the country lanes. Some of the worst crimes took place in the prettiest rural places—the shootings and house-burnings and the cattle-maiming—in the green hills, with the birds singing.

People said, "There's no solution ... Ireland's always had troubles ... Maybe it'll die out ... I suppose we could emigrate..."

I kept thinking: This is Britain!

It was like being shut in with a quarreling family and listening to cries of "You started it!" and "He hit me!" And I felt about Ulster as I had felt about some south coast boardinghouses on rainy days—I wanted to tiptoe to the front door and leave quietly and keep walking.

But I was grateful, too. No one had imposed on me. I had done nothing but ask questions, and I had always received interesting answers. I had met hospitable and decent people. No one had ever asked me what I did for a living. Perhaps this was tact: it was an impolite question in a place where so many people were on the dole.

I had been asked the question in England and Wales. "I'm in publishing," I always said. Publishing was respectable, harmless, and undiscussable. The conversation moved on to other matters. "I'm a writer" was a fatal admission, and certainly one of the great conversation-stoppers. Anyway, with me in wet shoes and scratched leather jacket and bruised knapsack, would anyone have believed I was a writer? But no one knew what publishers looked like.

On my last night in Belfast, I was asked. I was at Mooney's, talking to Mr. Doran, and I had asked too many questions about his upbringing, his mother, his ambitions, the crime rate, his job—

"And what do you do?" Doran asked, risking the question no one else had dared.

Obviously I did something. I was an alien.

"I'm in publishing," I said.

Doran's face lit up. Not once in seven weeks of my saying this had anyone responded so brightly. But this was Ireland.

"I'm working on a wee novel," Doran said, and ordered me another pint. "I've got about four hundred pages done—it's right in me room upstairs. Let's meet tomorrow and have another jar. I'll bring me novel with me. You'll love it. It's all about the troubles."

The next day I tiptoed past Doran's room. I heard the flutterblast of his snoring. I slipped out of Mooney's and shut the door on Ulster.

18. The 16:30 to Mallaig

AFTER MY DAYS of being menaced by Belfast's ugly face, I went by boat and train to Glasgow and found it peaceful, even pretty. It had a bad name. "Gleska," people said, and mocked the toothless population and spoke of razor fights in the Gorbals, and made haggis jokes. Yet Glasgow was pleasant—not broken, but eroded. The slums were gone, the buildings washed of their soot; the city looked dignified—no barricades, no scorchings. Well, I had just struggled ashore from that island of antiquated passions. In Ireland I had felt as though I had been walking blindly into the dark. But Scotland made me hopeful. This sunny day stretched all the way to Oban, where I was headed.

On my way from Glasgow Central to Queen Street Station, I fell in with two postmen. They asked me where I had come from. I told them Ulster. They said, "Och!"

"It's full of broken windows," I said.

"Aye. And broken hids!" one said.

The other man said, "We got our Catholics. Ha' ye nae heard of the Rangers and Celtics fitba matches? They play each other a guid sux tames a year, but there's nae always a riot."

No alphabet exists for the Glaswegian accent—phonetic symbols are no good without a glottal stop, a snort, or a wheeze. I met rural-dwelling Scots who told me they could not understand anyone in Glasgow. The Ulster accent took a moment to turn from noise to language: I heard someone speak and then in the echo of the voice there was a meaning. But this did not always happen in Scotland: the echo was meaningless, and in Glasgow it was a strangled peevish hiccup, sudden and untranslatable.

I rode in an empty railway car up the Clyde, past tenements. I wondered about their age. They were striking in their size and their darkness—six stories of stone, looking like prisons or lunatic asylums. Had the Scots originated the tenement? Their word for these old blocks was lands, and they had been using the word since the fifteenth century.

We went past Dumbarton (Dun Bretane, "Hill of the Britons"), along the muddy rock-strewn shore, the Firth of Clyde. Across the firth was the busy port of Greenock ("birthplace of Captain Kidd, the pirate"). There were hills behind it. I always had trouble with hills. These were not so much risen loaves as smooth and sloping and lightly upholstered...

A big old man came through the connecting door, and though there was not another person in the whole railway car, he sat beside me. I put my notebook into my pocket.

"I hope you're not embarrassed," he said.

Not embarrassed, but something—perhaps startled.

"I'm going to Oban," I said.

"Good," he said. "We can talk." He was also going the hundred miles.

But he did most of the talking. He was very old, and even sitting next to me he was a foot higher. He looked like a Pope. He had a fat nose and big baggy-fleshed hands. He wore a long black overcoat and carried a small parcel of books tied with twine: detective stories. His name was John L. Davidson and he had been born in Lanarkshire in 1895. He said that occasionally he did feel eighty-seven years old. How long had he lived in Dumbarton? "Only fifty years," he said. He lived in the Dumbarton Home for Aged Gentlefolk now. Everyone he had ever known was dead.

He said, "I'm only seven years younger than John Logie Baird. Have you not heard of him? He invented the tellyvision. He was born here in Helensburgh."

I looked out the window.

"Over there somewhere," Mr. Davidson said. "His teachers at school didnae think he was very bright. They thought he was a head case. One day he decided to invent a tellyphone. He put a wire across the road, a tellyphone instrument at either end, one in his house and one in his friend's. A man was riding a horse down the road, didnae see the wire—and strangled! Hanged himself on the wire of John Logie Baird's tellyphone! That's a true story. But he never hanged anyone on his tellyvision."

We came to Garelochhead; we traveled past Loch Long. The mountains above it were dark and rough, like enormous pieces of dusty coal. They were surrounded by pine woods. The loch was blue-black and looked depthless.

"This loch is so long, so deep, and so straight, they test torpedoes in it," Mr. Davidson said. "You can shoot a torpedo from one end to the other—thirteen miles or more. Want to see something interesting?"

He stood up and beckoned me to the window, slid it down, and said, "Watch."

We were coming to a junction, more tracks, and an isolated signal box. There were woods and hills all around. I expected the train to stop, but it did not even slow down. Mr. Davidson stuck his parcel of books out the window and dangled it. A railwayman was standing on a small raised platform near the signal box. He snatched the books and yelled, "Thank you!"

"I've come this way before. The trains don't stop. I heard that the signalman here likes to read a good book. There's no shops here, no library, so I brought those books for him."

Mr. Davidson had no idea who the signalman was, nor did he know his name. He knew only that the man liked to read a good book.

"There used to be ever so many wee houses on this line, but now there's nae many. It's out of touch. You see people on the train—after they've finished with their newspaper, they throw it out the window to someone on the line to read."

Then Mr. Davidson screamed. He erupted in anger, just like that, without any warning.

"But some of them make me cross! People who travel through Scotland on the train, doing the crossword puzzle! Why do they bother to come!"

And, just as suddenly, he was calm: "They call that mountain 'the Cobbler.' There's an open trough just behind it"—he pronounced it troch, to rhyme with loch.

At flat, mirror-still Loch Lomond, white as ice under a white sky, Mr. Davidson began talking about printing unions. I had told him I was in publishing.

"You're nae one of these bloody Fleet Street buggers!" he roared. It was another of his angry eruptions. "The printing unions are bloody! They're just protecting their own interests. They show up drunk and they get paid! 'Pay up!' 'But he's drunk!' 'Och, aye, but ye cannae bag Wully!' 'I'll bag him!' 'Bag him and we'll all go out!' It's bloody stupid!"

Mr. Davidson was roaring at the window, at the creamy clouds reflected in the loch, not at me.

"I'm nae a Queen Anne Tory," he said. "I'm a moderate Labour man. Aye, Jimmy, I was a trade unionist in 1912!"

He said he had been in the retail trade all his life—the grocery trade, another man's shop. He worked long hours. Eight in the morning until eight in the evening. A half-hour for lunch, a half-hour for tea.

The hills were bare from their midsection upward, and below this line were small pine trees. Mr. Davidson was very silent and then he leaned toward me and whispered sadly, "Everything you read's nae true."

He exploded again.

"They went daft with afforestation! It takes forty years for a tree to be useful. You could have forty years of lambs here, and instead they have trees!"

But there were not many trees. Three hundred years ago this district was full of hardwood forests—oak and beech. They were cut down and made into charcoal for the iron smelters at Taynuilt, up the line, famous for its cannonballs—Lord Nelson had fired them at the Battle of Trafalgar. Now the trees were wispy pines, and the hills were rocky and bare and black-streaked with falling water. The dark clouds were like another range of mountains, another foreign land, and the sun on some stones gave them a pale bony gleam.

I suppressed a shiver and said that it seemed rather bleak around here.

"Aye," Mr. Davidson said. "That's where its beauty comes from."

And he went to sleep. His mouth dropped open and he slept so soundly, I thought he had died.

***

Later, Mr. Davidson awoke and gulped, seeming to swallow what remained of his fatigue. He recognized Kilchurn Castle. He said there had been a crazy old woman living in the ruin until very recently. She had thought she was the last of the Campbells. But he had also known hard times, he said. He had had "three spells of poverty"—no work and nothing to eat.

"And I couldn't join the army. I wore spectacles, you see. If you wore spectacles, a gas mask was useless."

Then he was talking about the Somme.

"This country has no friends"—he meant Britain—"only enemies, and debts. We spent years paying off the Boer War debt. And we're still in debt."

He hugged his heavy coat around himself and frowned. When he did this, he looked shaggy and bearish. He was thinking.

"But there's nae debt for the Third World War. There'll be naebody left. Naebody can pay naebody! I blame"—he was erupting again—"I blame the poultices in the House of Commons! They'll start the next war and then there'll be naebody!"

We came to Oban. The railway station was white with a blue trim and had a clock tower showing the right time. There were seals in the harbor. On a hill above town was a full-sized replica of the Roman Colosseum, started in 1897 by a banker who thought something so ambitious would solve the unemployment problem. It was never finished; it was lovely and skeletal, symmetrical, purposeless. McCaig's Folly, they called it.

Even in Oban Mr. Davidson stayed by my side as he had in the empty railway car. He said the folly had a window for every day of the year.

"I'm a bachelor," he then explained. "I never married."

"No woman at all in eighty-seven years?"

"Nothing. And no drinking."

"Never had a drink?"

"Maybe a toddy or two," he said. "And I never smoked."

"A blameless life," I said.

"I've been sick, though," he said. "But nothing as far as sexual, drinking, or smoking."

Oban was made of stone. It was Scottish and solid, no honky-tonk, no spivs. It was a town of cold bright rooms, with rosy-cheeked people in sweaters sitting inside and rubbing their hands; it had fresh air and freezing water. If you were cold, you went for a walk and swung your arms to get the circulation up—no hearth fires until October. In Oban it struck me that most Scottish buildings looked as durable as banks. Here the dull clean town was on a coast of wild water and islands.

Some of these Scottish coastal towns looked as if they had been thrown out of the ground. They were fine polished versions of the same rocks they were on, but cut square and higher—not brought and built there by bricklayers, but carved out of these granite cliffs.

I saw Mr. Davidson my second day in Oban. He looked dead on a George Street bench, facing the harbor. His big hands were folded across his stomach, his mouth hung open. He had no suitcase—nothing but a rail ticket. Where had he slept? But I resisted asking questions, because I feared his answers.

He opened his yellow eyes on me.

I said, "I'm thinking of going to Fort William."

"There's a train in an hour," he said. "Where's your knapsack, Jimmy?"

He called everyone Jimmy.

I said, "At the bus shelter. I'm taking a bus up the coast."

He said, "I wasn't planning to do that."

"I'm sticking to the coast."

"Aye, Jimmy, stick to the coast." And he closed his eyes.

But there was a wild-eyed man on the bus. His name was White-law, he chewed a pipestem, he watched the window and shouted.

There were cages in the sea.

He cried, "Fish farm!"

There was dark and frothy water under the Connel Bridge.

He cried, "Falls of Lora!"

I saw boggy fields.

He cried, "That's where they cut peat!"

He was animated by the landscape. I wondered whether it was a Scottish trait. I had never seen an English person behave like this.

He cried, "The tide's out!"

It was. Eventually he got off the bus, at Portnacroish, on the Sound of Shuna.

It was a complicated coastline of hills and bays, lochs and rushing burns. It could not have been anything but the Scottish coast—so much water, so much steepness, such rocks. Ballachulish was like an alpine valley that had been scoured of all its softness—the feathery trees and chalets and brown cows whirled off its slopes, and all the gentle angles scraped away, until it lay bare and rugged, a naked landscape awaiting turf and forest.

Most of this western coastline in Scotland looked elemental in that way—as if it had been whipped clean and was waiting completion. It was hard and plain, most of it. It was very cold. I imagined sheep dying on it. Fort William was powerfully craggy. I began to think that this was the most spectacular coastline I had seen so far in Britain—huger than Cornwall, darker than Wales, wilder than Antrim. I stared at it and decided that it was ferocious rather than pretty, with a size and a texture that was surprisingly unfinished. It changed with the light, as coastal cliffs always did; it was always massive, but in a certain pale light it seemed murderous.

***

I was anonymous in Fort William. The other visitors had knapsacks, too, and oily shoes and binoculars. With Ben Nevis above it, and all the campsites of the Highlands just behind it, Fort William was full of hikers and fresh-air fiends all frantically interrogating each other about footpaths. The town was crowded and unpleasant-looking, heaving with campers, so after lunch I wiped my mouth and walked north and west along the railway line to the coast. Once again I thought: Some travel is a fantasy of running away.

Three miles away I came to the lower end of the Caledonian Canal. I wanted to see a boat passing through, but there was nothing on it except ducks. It was a sunny day and I was glad to be alone in the empty glen.

Then a wheezing voice said, "Hae ye got a match?" and I almost jumped out of my skin.

It was Jock MacDougal, with red eyes and a filthy face, trembling next to a tree. He had a scabby wound on his forehead, and his clothes were rags.

"I just want a match," he said. "I'm nae being cheeky."

He was trying to reassure me: he knew he was filthy and dangerous-looking. I gave him my matches and he slowly lit an inch-long cigarette butt that was flat, as if it had been stepped on. What an odd person to meet in a green glen.

He said, "I was never had up for assault or bodily harm or a breach of the peace in me whole life."

I stared at him. I did not know what to say.

"Only for being drunk and incapable," he said.

He had a little camp nearby—a nest of rags, some bottles, a smoky fire, and two comrades. There was a frightened woman named Alice and a man named Crawfurd, who was even filthier than MacDougal. Crawfurd called himself Tex. He was from Aberdeen.

"But I'm a Glasgow man," Jock said. "A Glasgow man will stick by you."

Alice looked wildly at him, but said nothing. She looked injured and was very silent.

Jock sang a song,

"Coom doon the stairs.

Tie up your bonny hairs!"

This seemed to frighten Alice even more.

He sang a song about a place called Fyvie. He there's a statue of a cow!"

"What's your trade?" Crawfurd said. He had a end of his nose and smelled of dead leaves.

I told them I was in publishing.

"Ha!" Jock said. "I'm a tramp! I'm a man of the road!"

Crawfurd said, "Do much traveling?"

"A certain amount," I said.

Crawfurd said, "I've been everywhere in the world."

"New Jersey? Argentina? Fiji?" I asked.

"Everywhere," he said.

I asked him to describe for me some of the more colorful spots he had seen.

"That would be too hard. There were so many."

Five feet away, Jock was crouching with his arm around Alice. Then he thrust his hand under her green sweater and she squawked.

"I have three passports," Crawfurd said. "A woman in Perth once said to me, 'I'd like to have twenty-four hours with you.'"

This amazed me. He stank, his teeth were black, he had blades of grass in his beard.

"She said, 'Know what you should do? You should write a travel book.'"

"Why don't you?" I asked. Now I was sorry I had told him I was in publishing. But what would he write, under this tree?

"There's too many bloody travel books," he said, and faced me, as if challenging me to deny it.

I did not deny it.

"Why are you here in Scotland?" Jock shouted to me. "People in Scotland are rubbish!"

I said I had to go, but they stood on the path, blocking my way.

"Give me some money," Jock said.

"Which way to Corpach?" I asked, still walking.

"I'm not telling any secrets unless you pay me!"

"All right, I'll pay."

He pointed. "Down there on the road."

I gave him a ten-pence coin.

He said, "Give me sixty or seventy."

"That was only worth ten," I said. "Now step aside."

The train was the 16:30 to Mallaig. I looked back and saw the hump of Ben Nevis, with streaks and splashes of snow in some of its hollows. It was a huge gray forehead of rock, with a green bare dome in front of it and three more on the south side. All the mountains here had the contours of hogs.

Mrs. Gordon in the next seat said, "Taking the train, to me, is like going to the cinema."

It was a splendid ride to Mallaig—one of the most scenic railway journeys in the world. But the train itself was dull, the passengers watchful and reverent, intimidated by all this scenery.

Scotland had a paradoxical beauty—its landscape was both lovely and severe; it was a monotonous extravaganza. The towns were as dull as any I had ever seen in my life, and the surrounding mountains very wild. I liked what I saw, but I kept wanting to leave. And the Scots had a nervous way with a joke. Their wit was aggressive and unsmiling. I wondered: Was that meant to be funny? When they were forthright they could become personal, especially on the subject of money. A Scot I met in Oban had accused me of wasting money when I told him that I had been planning to take a first-class sleeper to London; he regarded it as wasteful and selfish that I should want to be alone. And here on this Mallaig train a man wanted to know why, if there was no youth hostel in Mallaig, I planned to stay the night there? And why hadn't I bought a round-trip ticket—didn't I know it was cheaper than the one-way fare on a weekday? This was Mr. Buckie, who saved rubber bands—he had fourteen on his wrist—and had been wearing the same tweed cap since 1953. Coronation Year. He was not trying to be helpful. Penny-pinching had made him abusive, obstructive, and cross. He ended up by disliking me, as if I were wasting his money.

But I thought: In travel you meet people who try to lay hold of you, who take charge like parents, and criticize. Another of travel's pleasures was turning your back on them and leaving and never having to explain.

I changed my seat as we passed along the shore of Loch Eil. There were high mountains rising in the west, and more lochs. Some of the mountains were three thousand feet high and some lochs a thousand feet deep (Loch Morar a few miles away was even deeper). We crossed the Glenfinnian Viaduct—it was curved and long and had Romanesque arches, and it stood at the north end of the shiny black water of Loch Shiel, which lay beneath more rugged mountains.

There was great emptiness here. The train stayed high on the hillsides and did not descend into the valleys. There were ferns and bracken in the foreground, and some trees growing in narrow sheltered gullies out of the wind, but no human beings. The westerly gales had torn the soil from most hillsides. It was hard and lovely. The beauty was only part of it; you had to be tough to live here.

The landscape widened after Loch Ailort Station, and we were heading west, where the bright sun was setting, making the water blaze on Loch Nan Uamh, which was also the sea, and making the green grass luminous and vibrant, as if the pasture were trembling a foot from the ground. The light was perfect, because there was nothing in the way: the mountains stood separate and all the sea lochs here were long and stretched westward, so that the last of the sun shone uninterruptedly down their length.

The train bucked and turned north at Arisaig. The bays were like crater crusts filled with water. And offshore islands: Rhum, Eigg, Muck, and Canna—names like items from a misspelled menu. The Scour of Eigg was a hatchet shape against the sky. And now beneath the train there was a basin of green fields for three miles to the Sound of Sleat—and above the train were mountains of cracked rock and swatches of purple heather. Suddenly a horse was silhouetted in the sun, cropping grass beside the sea.

The train stopped at the level crossing at Morar—the opening and closing of gates, the latching and unlatching, clunk, clunk; and then the train chugged into Mallaig, where people were swimming in the freezing water, the foaming waves making lace caps for their bobbing heads.

That night I stared out the window at the freakish mountains on Skye. They were sharp-pointed, fantastic, and high, like peaks in dragon stories. They were the Cuillins, and their strange shape made them look unclimbable. Although it was after eleven, there was enough light for me to see them, and then near midnight they were ghostlier still: it was like winter light, a February afternoon in Boston, with the grayness of a gathering shadow.

***

In all my coastal travel I never met a fisherman who said he was satisfied. They hated the life, they said. The prices were bad, the competition was tough, the waters were overfished. Foreign fishermen were to blame—the Russians, the Japanese, the Danes. Foreigners scooped up everything—sprats, fry, undersized fish—and beat them into fishmeal on their factory ships.

Captain Cameron on his fishing boat, Lord Roberts, at Mallaig said, "Anyone here would sell his boat if he could get a fair price for it. The fishing business is dead. I should have sold mine when I could, a few years ago. Now I'm fifty-seven, and I have to work as long as I can. I won't be able to retire—haven't got the money. I'll work until I'm too weak to go on, and then my kids will be cursed with this bloody boat."

He was taking seventeen crates of prawns' tails ashore, about a thousand quids' worth ($1700), but his fuel bill for this trip was five hundred ($850), and he had a crew of five. There was hardly any profit in it. They had been at sea for nearly a week.

"Someday there'll be no fishing at all," Captain Cameron said. "It'll pass into ancient history."

On my second morning at Mallaig, Mrs. Fleming's daughter served me my breakfast and said, "Princess Diana's had a baby boy."

Everyone was pleased: an heir to the throne. It was another national event in an eventful period. The Falklands War had started and finished as I had been traveling. The Pope had come and gone. The Royal Baby was born. A railway strike was threatened. Three million people were unemployed—13 percent of the workforce—and one person out of six in Scotland was without a job. There was a deranged murderer loose in Yorkshire. They were public events and they had the effect of making people unusually talkative. "This Falklands business—" And then the American President visited and went horseback riding with the Queen. He made a speech. People smiled a little when they heard my accent. "I just saw your President on television—" It was supposed to be a kingdom of close-mouthed people, but the war and the strife and the Pope and now the birth of a future King had brought about a relentless garrulity. I needed a little air.

I took the road north out of the town. The road ended; a track began. It was a rough stony path that circled a gray hill above the sea. I walked along the shore of Loch Nevis. Just over the hill at Loch Morar people sometimes searched for underwater monsters. I walked to Inverie, which was a house on a road that went nowhere. I wondered how much farther I should go. The coast was in-and-out for hundreds of miles. I liked walking, but I was no snorting Rambler with plus fours and a pickaxe. If I saw a sheep on the path, I stopped and stared at it. I sat down and sketched a tall thistle at Inverie—the Scottish thistles seemed to me magical, and as complicated as crystals. I looked at birds. I tried to think of descriptions for these unusual islands—they were less like islands than old bare mountains in the sea. I was distracted by all the water and rock, the great heights of cloud, the ruined stone cottages along the coastal paths, the lived-in cottages in remote places that looked as though they were growing more remote—places reachable only in small boats.

It would have taken more than a week to walk from Mallaig to the Kyle of Lochalsh, up the coast. So I sailed there in the ferry Lochmorar, twenty-three miles along the Sound of Sleat. The boat passed more of these remote cottages. It said something about Scottish self-reliance and toughness that people willingly lived in such difficult places. In the whole of Britain there could not have been houses more inaccessible than these scattered over the shores of the Western Isles. The Scots here chose a distant ledge or a remote shore, and put up a stone house, and slammed their door on the world.

The coast had deep inlets and high cliffs, and it was so strange and steep, it had the effect of concentrating travelers in specific places. On this boat, for example. Or on certain valley roads. In Fort William and Oban and Mallaig. In England and Wales people were quickly absorbed by the countryside, and the coastal towns could seem very empty. But here in Scotland the countryside and the coastal steepness were forbidding, so everyone traveled on a few routes—and they had always traveled on those routes. The traveler to Mull had to go to Oban, just like Doctor Johnson and Boswell in 1773.

At the Kyle of Lochalsh I crossed to Skye, on the ferry to Kyleakin ("from Haakon, King of Norway, who sailed through here in 1263") and walked the empty roads to Broadford, eight miles. I stayed and climbed partway up a red mountain merely to have another glimpse at the Cuillins. I did not go any closer. I wanted to save them for another time. It was always a surprise and a pleasure to find a place on the British coast that I wished to return to. It gave me hope, because I knew I would not come back alone. I wanted to come here again with someone I loved and say, "Look."

The sun on Skye warmed the pines and the flowers and gave it the fragrance of Nantucket.

***

The way between the huge simple mountains and cold lochs, from the Kyle of Lochalsh to Dingwall, was one of the great railway routes of Britain. It took me off the coast, but what else could I do? The northerly shore was broken and labyrinthine. It would only be a stunt to follow every mile of it, just to report on Loch Snizort and Trotternish. And the train was a greater temptation. Anyway, many of these lochs were also notches on the coast. Loch Carron, for example—the south bank, on which this train was traveling—was sixteen miles of coast.

Nothing looked to me colder than the Scottish lochs, and they seemed to become colder still as the clouds piled up and night deepened. But these were short nights—a few cloudy hours of wintry light, and then morning. It was eight o'clock, and every landscape feature was clearly visible—the water, the hills, the tree farms, the long valley floor of Glen Carron, which seemed to be covered with grassy mounds—tombs and tumuli.

"Ach, some of these villages have been here since the year dot," a man named Macnab said to me. Yes, they had a mossy, buried look. But many looked bleakly exposed, plopped down, and untidy—no hedges, no bushes—the bushiest thing in Achnasheen was the stationmaster's beard.

We were delayed at Garve. I thought: I'll give it an hour, and if we're still here I'll get off and walk up the Black Water or hitch to Ullapool. (Delays always sent me to my map for an escape route.)

Malcolm Biles asked for a look at my map. He was twenty-three, a post office clerk from Inverness who was on a cheap day-return. I had wanted to meet a post office worker, I told him. British post office workers did much more than sell stamps. They processed car licenses, television licenses, Family Allowance, pensions, Inland Telegram postal orders, all the tasks required by the Post Office Savings Bank, and a hundred other things. They had seven weeks' training, and the rest had to be learned on the job, in full view of the impatient public. It was Malcolm who spoke of the impatience—people were much ruder than they used to be and some of them stood there and ticked you off!

"What about dog licenses?" I asked.

Dog licenses! It was Malcolm Biles's favorite subject. The price of a dog license was 37½ pence (about sixty cents), because in 1880 it had been fixed at seven shillings and sixpence. The fee had never been changed. Wasn't that silly? I agreed it was. There were six million dogs in Britain, but only half of them were licensed. But the amazing thing was that it cost £4 (almost $7.00) to collect the dog license—the time, paperwork, and so forth.

"Why not abolish the fee?" I asked.

Malcolm said, "That would be giving up."

"Why not increase it to something realistic—say, five quid?"

"That would be unpopular," he said. "No government would dare try it."

"How long do you figure you'll be staying in the post office?"

"For the rest of my life, I hope," he said. The train jolted. "Ah, we're away."

I tried to imagine a whole lifetime in a post office. I could not imagine it. I got to the end of a few years and then nothing would come—a blur, fatigue, bewilderment, indifference. It was easier to imagine the life of that crofter talking gently to his dog at Strath-peffer.

Still, we discussed the post office and debated the issue of dog licenses until we came to Dingwall ("birthplace of Macbeth").

19. The Flyer to Cape Wrath

MY BLUE GUIDE'S description of the northwest coast of Scotland suggested a setting that was straight out of Dracula or The Mountains of Madness. "The road crosses a strange and forbidding mountain wilderness," it began, "of sombre rock-strewn glens, perched glacial boulders, and black lochs." And then, "after 8 m. of lonely moor and dark bog ... the road from the ferry's w. end to Cape Wrath crosses a bleak moor called The Parph, once notorious for its wolves," and at last, "the road rises across a desolate moor..."

It made me want to set off at once. It seemed the perfect antidote to the Presbyterian monotony of Dingwall. If the guidebook's description was accurate, it would be like traveling to the end of the world—in any case, the British world. Cape Wrath was not merely remote—the ultimate coastline—it was also such a neglected place and reputedly so empty that the method for getting there had not changed for eighty years or more. Baedeker's Great Britain for 1906 said, "From Lairg, mail-cart routes diverge in various directions, by means of which the highly picturesque country to the W. and N.W.... may be conveniently explored..."

At Dingwall Station I asked the best way to Cape Wrath.

"Get the post bus at Lairg," Mr. MacNichols said.

In other words, the mail cart. There was no train, there was no bus, there was hardly a road—it was paved the width of a wagon for fifty-six miles. There were people who still called the post bus "the flyer," as they called tenant farms "crofts" and porridge "crowdie."

The train to Lairg left Dingwall and passed along the edge of Cromarty Firth, which at this state of the tide was shallow water seeping into the mudflats. Not long before, the railway line was to have been shut down, but it had been reprieved. It passed through the bleakest, boggiest part of Caithness, where the roads were often bad, and in winter it was an essential service. But Mr. MacNichols had confided to me that in the off season there were sometimes only three or four people on board.

To save money on the line, some of the stations had been closed. The ruined, boarded-up station building at Alness resembled many I had seen in Ulster. A large aluminum smelter had just closed at Invergordon—nine hundred more people out of work and another building left to rot. Decrepitude was decrepitude—the fury of terrorists was indistinguishable from the willfulnes of budget-cutters and accountants.

Beyond the village of Fearn there were farms and fields of a classic kind: long vistas over the low hills, quiet houses, and smooth fields of fat sheep. There were steeples under the soft gray sky at Tain—the Tolbooth, with a conical spire and turrets, and a church spire like a freshly sharpened pencil. Pink and purple lupins shook on the station platform.

People used this train for shopping, traveling to a place like Tain from miles up the line. Two ladies were sitting next to me. They were Mrs. Allchin and Mrs. MacFee. They were discussing the butcher.

"Duncan is very obliging," Mrs. Allchin said. "We often give him a lift on stormy days."

"I think it's an ideal place, Tain," Mrs. MacFee said.

Mrs. MacFee had two large bags of groceries, and she had also managed to find a packet of "toe-spacers" at the chemist's shop. It eased her mind to know that she had these for pedicures and nail-varnishing. Kenneth had mentioned a dinner-dance at the Lodge, and she did not want to fuss at the last minute.

Mrs. Allchin had been very lucky in Tain. Ian's lad, wee Colum, was having a birthday, and she had found a box of something called "indoor fireworks." Apparently, you just cleared a space on the table and set them off. Apparently, they were perfectly safe. Chinese.

"What won't they think of next," Mrs. MacFee said.

But Mrs. Allchin's mind was elsewhere. The indoor fireworks reminded her that she was chain-smoking again She often chain-smoked in trains. It worried her, like nail-biting.

"I dinna drink, at any rate," Mrs. Allchin said.

We traveled inland, toward the hills at Culrain, which had a ruined look. And the roof was off the station at Invershin. Some other stations had clearly been sold off to be turned into common bungalows or holiday homes. There were cabbages growing where the platform had been.

We went through Acharry Glen—the River Shin on the left. I had settled down to watch the mountains passing, but soon we came to Lairg and I had to get out.

There was something very disconcerting about leaving a train in the middle of nowhere. It was all activity and warm upholstery, and then the clang of a carriage door and the train pulled out and left me in a sort of pine-scented silence. Lairg Station was two miles from Lairg, but even Lairg was nowhere.

I saw a man throwing mailbags and bundles of newspapers into the back of an old-fashioned vehicle. It was a cut-down version of a bus, about the size of a hearse. Still the man went on loading it with the bags and bundles the train had left.

I cleared my throat. He looked up. I said I was going to Durness on the post bus.

"This is the post bus," he said. "We can leave as soon as I get these bags loaded."

His name was Michael Mathers. He pronounced it "Maithers." His accent was not Scottish. It was fairly Gaelic and very Scandinavian, a soft Norse whirr in every syllable. Later, I discovered that everyone in his part of Sutherland had the same accent, a legacy of the Vikings. This accent was all that remained of the local dialect, Norn.

We set off for Lairg and picked up more mail and an old couple on their way to Scourie. Michael said that this was a Bedford bus, only ten years old. It had gone 400,000 miles.

"When I took over," he said, "we had an Albion. Made in Glasgow. That one went 650,000 miles in fifteen years."

He had been driving for twenty-one years. He was forty-four and had the solemn, kindly face of a fisherman. He had once tried working on a fishing boat. He said, "You need a strong stomach for that." It was cold, it was hard, there wasn't much money. At midnight on a pitching boat, struggling with nets, he would look into the distance and see the lights of Durness: the lucky people indoors. So he had chucked it.

We headed out of Lairg and were almost immediately in a bog. It was a wide dark landscape, with rocks and grass and heather close by, and mountains ahead.

There was no better glimpse into the life of remote Sutherland than through the smeared windows of this eight-seater. The post bus was a lifeline and Mr. Mathers much more than a driver. He not only picked up mail and dropped it off, and ran with it to houses in the rain, and carried scribbled messages from house to house; he also drove along a single-track road for the whole of the way north, which meant he had to stop when a car approached from the opposite direction—eighty or ninety times in a single trip—because the road was only wide enough for one car. He carried milk. He carried newspapers. He carried shapeless bundles labeled For Graham.

He stopped the bus at the Reeks, in the middle of a peat field, and with the mist flying sideways he hurried to the door with a pint of milk, the T.V. Times, today's Scotsman, and a birthday card for Mrs. Campbell. Farther down the road, at Fernside, it was two pints and a Mirror, and then a five-minute trot up a muddy path to deliver a junk-mail Sunglasses Special Offer from the Automobile Association (though Mr. Innes was expecting a long-overdue letter from his daughter in Australia), and then a copy of the Sun to Hope Cottage, and another favor—fifteen pounds of wet fish in a plastic shopping bag for a householder who had asked for it over at Kinloch. And more newspapers. Such effort and expense to bring people copies of the gutter press! But that was Mr. Mathers' job. And he was never abrupt. Whenever he handed something over, he exchanged a greeting. "How's your mother feeling?" and "The sheep are looking well" and "It feels like rain."

We came to an unearthly, gigantic landscape along Loch More in the Reay Forest. The fields looked bitter and brown and the loch very cold, and the mountains were vast shrouds of rock. One of these silver mountains was the most beautiful I had so far seen in Britain—a great bulge glittering with cataracts of scree. It looked as if it had just frozen in that carbuncular shape the day before.

"That's Arkle," Mrs. MacGusty said. She wasn't local. Her accent was amused and tentative, like someone nibbling shortbread, the tones of Morningside—the genteel landlady accent of Edinburgh. "It's Icelandic, you see."

What did that mean?

"It's all turned over. These high mountains"—she seemed to be describing babies, her voice was so affectionately savoring the words—"Ben Stack and Arkle—what should be on the bottom is on the top, they reckon, the geologists. You look at them and you think, They all look duffrent!'"

Mr. MacGusty said, "They're also very beg."

This was Achfary, "the Duke of Westminster's estate," Mrs. MacGusty said.

"Does he farm here?" I asked.

"Oh, no. It's an estate. He keeps it for the shooting and the fishing. Prince Charles comes here in a helicopter sometimes, for the shooting. Och! I expect you're a republican!"

We were sitting by the roadside in the post bus as the rain came down. Mr. Mathers was bringing a copy of yesterday's Express to a cottage behind a high wall.

I said, "So it's all gamekeepers here?"

"Aye," Mr. MacGusty said. "The duke owns a good butt of Sutherland." He thought a moment. "It's the old way of life." He thought again. "It's very unfair, in a way."

It was more a shrug than a protest. But he was resigned. After all, we were talking about feudalism.

The past was accessible here as a present fact. Not only in ducal estates and private game reserves, but also in ancient names. The MacGustys got off the bus at Laxford Bridge. It w?‹s a Norse name—lax meant salmon (and of course the Yiddish lox for smoked salmon was a cognate). Then Mr. Mathers told me how his parents had both been fluent Gaelic speakers and that he spoke it fairly well. And peat-cutting was part of the past, too. The peat was free, but cutting it was backbreaking work. It was cut and left to dry in stacks, so everything depended on good weather. Even present-day crime sounded somewhat outdated—sheep rustlers and squatters and poachers.

We drove up the narrow track to Rhiconich. This was actually the coast, a muddled maze of islands and lochs. We went to Kinlochbervie, which was a busy fishing port on a sea loch, dealing in whitefish and lobsters.

We stopped twenty more times. Mr. Mathers did this twice a day on this small windy corner of Scotland. When he stopped and parked, the wind shook the bus and rattled the cottage gates and moaned against the telegraph wires. A pint of milk, a Scotsman, and a printed postcard saying This is to acknowledge your communication of the 13th inst. to Mrs. Massey at Drumbeg.

"Cape Wrath doesn't mean 'angry,'" Mr. Mathers said. "It's from a Norse word that means 'turning point.' This is where the ships turned south. Sutherland is another Norse name—it was south for them."

Then he smiled. "Don't be disillusioned," he said. "The weather can be hellish here. In 1952, when I was still at school, we had a January storm. The winds were a hundred and twenty miles an hour—roofs were torn off houses. The Irish ferry was lost that night. It's often bad weather—horrible weather. I pity the lads in those wee fishing boats."

We came to Durness. He said, "This is it. There aren't more than three hundred people here. It's the work problem, you see. There's no employment."

The village was empty, but the wind was a presence—wild gusts flew in from the direction of the Faeroes.

I walked back through the sandy cliffs, among the rabbit holes, to Keoldale and the Cape Wrath Hotel, and had my first good meal for days. There were a number of English anglers at the hotel. They blustered when the national news came on. They were all Tories. They called the Prime Minister "Maggie." Her nonsense suited their nonsense. One said he wanted to shoot the man being interviewed, who claimed he had known all along that the Falklands were going to be invaded. "Too many bloody people giving advice!" Another said that half the Labour Party should be shot for treason. One thing about anglers, though. They went to bed early.

The next day I crossed the Kyle of Durness and walked seven miles to Kearvaig, which was like the end of the earth. But this was Cape Wrath proper and had peaty soil—it was crumbling cliffs and sand at Durness.

I saw a seal take a salmon. People told me that seals did not really eat them—that they just took bites of a fish's shoulders and threw the rest away. But this seal lay on his back with the eight-pound salmon in his mouth, and he tossed his head and snapped his jaws and ate the whole thing.

Then on my way back I saw a flock of sheep crossing a sandbar in the Kyle of Durness. The tide was coming in. The sheep started moving. Soon they were swimming, the big horned sheep in front, the lambs behind, with their noses out of the water. They were North Highland Cheviots. They moved very slowly, for the tide was still rising and they were still far from the bank. Fifteen minutes later the Kyle was filled, there were fewer sheep visible, and then there were none. They had all drowned, about nine of them, under the gray torn sky.

***

Some fantasies prepare us for reality. The sharp steep Cuillins were like mountains from a storybook—they had a dramatic, fairy-tale strangeness. But Cape Wrath was unimaginable. It was one of those places where, I guessed, every traveler felt like a discoverer who was seeing it for the first time. There are not many such places in the world. I felt I had penetrated a fastness of mountains and moors, after two months of searching, and I had found something new. So even this old, overscrutinized kingdom had a secret patch of coast! I was very happy at Cape Wrath. I even liked its ambiguous name. I did not want to leave.

There were other people in the area: a hard-pressed settlement of sheep farmers and fishermen, and a community of drop-outs making pots and jewelry and quilts at the edge of Balnakeil. There were anglers and campers, too, and every so often a brown plane flew overhead and dropped bombs on one of the Cape Wrath beaches, where the army had a firing range. But the size of the place easily absorbed these people. They were lost in it, and as with all people in a special place, they were secretive and a little suspicious of strangers.

Only the real natives were friendly. They were the toughest Highlanders and they did not match any Scottish stereotype I knew. They did not even have a recognizably Scottish accent. They were like white crows. They were courteous, hospitable, hard-working, and funny. They epitomized what was best in Scotland, the strong cultural pride that was separate from political nationalism. That took confidence. They were independent, too—"thrawn" was the Lowlands word for their stubborn character. I admired their sense of equality, their disregard for class, and the gentle way they treated their children and animals. They were tolerant and reliable, and none of this was related to the flummery of bagpipes and sporrans and tribalistic blood-and-thunder that Sir Walter Scott had turned into the Highland cult. What I liked most about them was that they were self-sufficient. They were the only people I had seen on the whole coast who were looking after themselves.

It was a shire full of mountains, with spaces between—some valleys and some moors—and each mountain was separate. To describe the landscape it was necessary to describe each mountain, because each one was unique. But the soil was not very good, the sheep were small, the grass thin, and I never walked very far without finding a corpse—loose wool blowing around bones, and the bared teeth of a skull.

"Look," a shepherd named Stephen said to me on one of these hillsides.

A buzzard-sized bird was circling.

"It's a hooded crow," Stephen said. "They're desperate creatures. In a place like this—no shelter, no one around for miles—they find a lamb and peck its eyes out. It's lost, it can't get to its mother, it gets weak. Then the hooded crows—so patient up there—dive down and peck it to pieces. They're a terrible bird."

He said that it was the predatory crows, not the weather, that killed the lambs. It was a cold place, but not excessively so. In winter there was little snow, though the winds were strong and the easterlies were usually freezing gales. There were always birds in the wind—crows and hawks and comic squawking oystercatchers with long orange bills and singing larks and long-necked shags and stuttering stonechats.

It could be an eerie landscape, especially on a wet day, with all the scattered bones gleaming against the dun-colored cliffs and the wind scraping against the heather. It surprised me that I was happy in a place where there were so few trees—there were none at all here. It was not picturesque and it was practically unphotographable. It was stunningly empty. It looked like a corner of another planet, and at times it seemed diabolical. But I liked it for all these reasons. And more important than these, my chief reason for being happy was that I felt safe here. The landscape was like a fierce-looking monster that offered me protection; being in Cape Wrath was like having a pet dragon.

On one of my walks I met a veterinarian, Doctor Pike, who was making the rounds of the Cape Wrath farms, trying to persuade the farmers to dip their sheep. An ailment called sheep scab had been brought over from Ireland and had endangered some of the flocks.

Doctor Pike was a fluent Gaelic speaker. He was self-assured and well read, and though he did not boast, he did imply a moral superiority in the Highlander—and in the Scots in general—and he suggested that there was something lamentable and decadent in the English.

"Take the colonies," he said. "The Scots who went out were very hard-working and idealistic. But for a lot of the English families the colonies were the last resort. They sent the black sheep of the family—the rubbish, the drunkards, the layabouts."

We were walking around Balnakeil Bay; he was headed for a farmhouse. We passed a shepherd driving a flock of sheep to be shorn.

Doctor Pike said, "You might take that shepherd to be a fool or a rustic. But most of these shepherds are sensible men. I mean, they read. I go to many of these shepherds' wee cottages and—do you know?—I find lots of books in some of them. They take books with them out on the hillsides."

We had a good view of the sea—the mouth of the bay was wide. There were no boats out there. I seldom saw boats, at any rate. It was one of the roughest areas on the British coast, and the scarcity of boats added to the feeling of emptiness I felt on shore. It was like the world after a catastrophic bomb.

Doctor Pike was still talking about shepherds. He said, "There was a man here from Edinburgh. He saw a shepherd in the hills and said how wonderful it was to get so much fresh air and exercise. 'But how does it feel to be so far from the center of things?'

"The shepherd stared at him and smiled. 'That depends what you mean by the center of things.' You see, he felt that it was just a matter of perspective. Who was this city man to say that the shepherd was not at the center of things?"

I told Doctor Pike that I had seen nine sheep drown in the incoming tide at the Kyle of Durness. He said it was a pity but it sometimes happened. Although sheep could swim, the horns of a ram made it hard for the creature to keep its head up, and the lambs were too frail to swim very far. But he said that he loved sheep—he loved working with them.

"They have very keen instincts. They have a wonderful sense for forecasting the weather—they know when a gale is coming. They begin leaving the hills many days before it begins to snow."

The next day I went with Doctor Pike to Loch Eriboll. It was a sea loch piercing ten miles of Sutherland, and it was deep enough to take the largest ships. In the storms for which this part of Scotland was notorious, ships found a quiet anchorage here.

"I want you to see something," Doctor Pike said.

We rounded a bend, turning south toward Laid, along the shore of the hugh loch.

"Look at this hillside," he said.

It was a rough, steep slope, covered with small white boulders. Patches of the slope had been plowed, but most of it was covered with glacial rubble and humps, and the grass was blackish and sparse. Some sheep stood on it and looked at us with their characteristic expression of indifference and curiosity. This grazing land was very bad.

"Now look over there, across the loch," he said.

It was like a different country, a different climate. It was not bouldery—it was soft and green. There were grassy meadows and gentle slopes over there. It was sheltered by the mountains behind it, and pleasant streams ran through it. There were trees over there! There were no houses; there were no sheep.

But this windswept side of the loch—the western shore, on which we stood—was lined with tiny whitewashed cottages. They were surrounded by broken walls and fences and some bushes. And there were gnarled trees, none higher than the cottage eaves. The roofs fitted the cottages in an irregular way, like lopsided caps, and made the cottages pathetic.

"These people once lived over there, on the good side of the loch. They were cleared off that land and moved here. They were crofters then—they're crofters still. They were given the worst land."

He was talking about the clearances, the evictions by the chiefs and landlords who wanted to cash in on the land. It had taken years, but the Highlands were eventually emptied—that is, the fertile parts. Enormous sheep farms replaced some crofts, and others were turned into playgrounds—grouse moors and baronial estates. This was also a major reason for the tremendous number of Scottish emigrants, dispersed across the world between 1780 and 1860. So what had seemed to me no more than an early chapter in a history of Scotland, or a melodramatic painting by Landseer, was a lingering injustice. The cruelty of the clearances was still remembered, because many people who had been made poor still remained where they had been dumped.

"Is it any wonder that some of them are poachers?" Doctor Pike said.

He was fairly passionate on the subject. He said the land ought to be nationalized and divided into smaller units. The land could be made productive—people would have jobs.

I said he was the first left-wing veterinarian I had ever met. He denied that he was left wing. He said most radicals were devils. Then he said, "Want to meet one of the victims of the clearances?"

We stopped at a small white cottage near the edge of the loch and were greeted by an old man. This was Davey McKenzie. He wore a tweed hat and a threadbare jacket and loose trousers. His shoes were cracked and broken. He had a healthy face and good color, and he was sinewy. He was about seventy or a bit more. He raised some sheep and he grew vegetables and he was always followed by a black terrier with a pleading face that lay down and snored whenever Mr. McKenzie sat down.

"We can't stay," Doctor Pike said.

"You'll have a cup of tea," Mr. McKenzie replied. He had the same Norse whirr in his accent that I had been hearing for days.

We entered the cottage and were introduced to Jessie Stewart, Mr. McKenzie's sister. She was perhaps a year or two younger than he, but she was pale and rather feeble. Doctor Pike whispered to me that she had recently had an operation, and he added, "She's far from well."

"Sit down in front of the fire," she said. "I'll put the tea on."

It was the end of June—a few days from July—and yet a fire burned in the cottage hearth, and the wind made the rosebushes scratch at the window.

Doctor Pike said, "Don't trouble yourself, Mrs. Stewart."

"It's no trouble," she said. "And don't call me Mrs. Stewart. No one calls me that. I'm Jessie."

The cottage was comfortable but austere—a few potted plants, pictures of children and grandchildren, a calendar from Thurso and some Scottish souvenirs, a glass paperweight showing Arthur's Seat, and a little doll in a tartan kilt.

Doctor Pike said his piece about sheep scab and then turned to me. "You know you're in the Highlands when people make you welcome like this. No one is sent away. If you come to the door of a Highlander, he lets you in."

"That's very true," Davey McKenzie said softly.

"I know a rune about that in Gaelic," Doctor Pike said. "Translated, it goes like this:

'I saw a stranger yestreen.

I put food in the eating place,

Drink in the drinking place,

Music in the listening place—

And the lark in its song sang!

'Often, often, often, often,

Comes the Christ in the stranger's guise.'"

"That's very beautiful," Davey said.

"Some people come," Jessie said. "But these days there are vandals about. We never locked our doors before, but now we lock them. People come—they look so strange, some of these hikers and campers, and the women are worse than the men."

She went for the tea. Doctor Pike said, "I was telling Paul about the crofters here, how they were moved from the other side—from that good land."

He did not say that it was over a century ago.

"It was unfair, aye," Davey said. He blinked at me. He had wet, red-rimmed eyes. "There's so much good land lying idle. Aye, it's hard land where we are."

He was a quiet man. He said no more. It seemed to me terrible that he had spent his whole life trying to feed his family by digging this stony ground, and always in sight of the green fields under Ben Arnaboll across the loch.

But the bad land had turned many people into wanderers. Jessie Stewart's life was proof of that.

"So you come from America," she said to me. "I've been to America myself. I spent eighteen years there."

I asked her where exactly.

She said, "In Long Island and Virginia. New York City. Bar Harbor, Maine."

"The best places."

"I was in service," she said. "The people were wealthy, you see."

Her employers had moved from house to house, according to the season, and she had moved with them. Perhaps she had been a cook. Her scones were wonderful—she had brought out a whole tray of scones and shortbread and sandwiches with the tea.

Why had she left America?

"I got very ill. For a while I couldn't work, and then I started getting doctors' bills. You know how expensive hospitals are in the United States. There's no National Health Service—"

And she had no insurance; and the family she worked for wouldn't pay; and she needed major surgery.

"—I could never have afforded it there," she said. "It would have taken all my savings. I came back home here and had my operation on the National Health. I'm feeling a wee bit better now."

So she had left the poverty trap in the Highlands and emigrated to the United States and become a servant and fallen into the American poverty trap. And now she was dying on the croft where she had been born. Most of the crofters here were old people whose children had moved away.

I continued to Caithness alone. The farther east I went, the greener it was, the more fertile the land. There were high mountains near the sea. The sheep were fat. They winced from the ditches where they crouched to get out of the wind. I went on to Coldbackie, Bettyhill, and Swordly. They were small cold places. I went to Brawl and Bighouse. The grass was better here. Caithness was a milder, more sheltered place, with sweet-smelling grass. But I liked it much less than Sutherland—its mountains streaming with pale scree, its black valleys of peat, its miles of moorland and bog, its narrow roads and surfy coast, and its caves. Tt was like a world apart, an unknown place in this the best-known country in the world. No sooner had I left it than I wanted to go back.

20. The 14:40 to Aberdeen

FROM THURSO I walked ten miles to Dunnet Head ("the most northerly point of mainland Britain"). On this sunny day its cliffs were a rich bronze-orange and the foam on the violent currents of the Pentland Firth was being whipped into peaks by the wind. The rest of the countryside was as flat and tame as the flagstones it had once produced. Only the place names were exciting—not just Buldoo and John O'Groats, but Hunspow and Ham, and Thrumster, Scrabster, Shebster, and Lybster. And who or what were the Hackle-makers of Buckies?