The Kingdom by the Sea

People had babies in Thurso and round about. That was unusual. It was a noticeable fact that in most places on the coast there were few small children being towed by parents—even on the sands. I saw big idle youths and middle-aged people and the very old. The very old, especially. They lived in the poorer, sorrier places. But Thurso had become prosperous from the offshore oil, and in the three or four towns on the British coast where there were jobs, there were also young families.

After a day and a night in Thurso I took the branch line down to Helmsdale, on the east coast. The summer brightness of the Scottish evenings made the flat brown moorland shimmer, and even the fissured bogs and sandpits did not seem so bad. We went along, stopping at ruined stations. THIS IS THE AGE OF THE TRAIN, the British Rail posters said, showing a man from a television show who was noted for his work on behalf of the handicapped people and incurables. He had been hired to promote British Rail. This branch line was certainly on its last legs. It was slow and dirty. But I liked it for being derelict and still stubbornly running across the moors. This was a little like being in Turkey.

The heather was in bloom at Helmsdale, and among the low twisted trees there were thorn bushes and yellow flowers on the gorse. Large boulders stood on the strand here, where the North Sea lapped the coast, filling the rock pools. The sea was overlooked by small isolated farms and hills coifed with thick ferns. Sheep nosed around old gun emplacements and crumbling pillboxes.

I had high tea—kippers, a poached egg, and scones with fresh cream—and took a later train south. It was sandy beaches to Brora and beyond. At Brora I saw a sheep-shearer. He was kneeling against a fat sheep and clipping her with hand shears, just beside the railway line. He did not look up. There were smears of sheep grease on his arms. He was clipping the creature gently, and the sheep was not struggling much. It was as if the shearer were giving his big child a haircut.

It was a long zigzag through Easter Ross to Inverness, where I was planning to head for Aberdeen. I walked through this slow branch-line train. In the guard's van there was a crate with a label saying. Pathological Specimens—Do Not Freeze, and in the next car a girl was writing a letter that began, "Dearest Budgie." There were campers returning from the Orkneys, and cyclists winding up their coastal tour. A Polish couple (the Zmudskys) were gnawing bread rolls—and their laps were spangled with crust crumbs. A man with unforgiving eyes, named Wockerfuss, and his middle-aged-looking child, a boy of ten, sat sharing a book titled Schottland.

Mr. Zmudsky smiled at a group of six men.

"Pgitty tgees," Mr. Zmudsky said, nodding at the trees out the window.

"Yews," one of the men said, and, realizing that Mr. Zmudsky was a foreigner, the man raised his voice, crying, "Yews!"

At this Mr. Wockerfuss stiffened, seeming to understand but refusing to look.

The group of men were railway buffs. They were always a sure sign that a branch line was doomed. The railway buffs were attracted to the clapped-out trains, like flies to the carcass of an old nag. They had stopwatches and timetables and maps. They sat by the windows, ticking off the stations as we went by. Ardgay (tick!). Tain (tick!), Invergordon (tick!), Alness (tick!), Muir of Ord (tick!), and then a bewildered little ticker named Neville twitched his big lips crossly and complained, "Hey, what happened to Dingwall?"

***

In a bed-and-breakfast place (Balfour Lodge) in Inverness I pondered the question as to whether Inverness could be regarded as on my coastal route. It was a matter of perspective. The map was not much help. Everything seemed to depend on how one described the Moray Firth. Was that part of the North Sea?

And then I was too bored to do anything but set off immediately for Aberdeen. Balfour Lodge was operated by a quarrelsome couple named Alec and June Catchpenny. It was a cold house. The bathmat was damp. The Catchpennys sulked. Their dog looked diseased, and I wanted to tell them it ought to be put down. I hated Alec's bowling trophies. Nor did either Catchpenny speak to me. "Six pounds" were the only words spoken to me in my twenty hours at Balfour Lodge. But what they bellowed at each other made me suspect that if I were to go fossicking in their bedroom drawers, I would find what the dirty shops called "marital aids."

I went, via Elgin and Insch, to Aberdeen on the 14:40. A new railway strike was threatened, and most of the passengers were talking angrily about the strikers.

"They won't have jobs to come back to," said one man. This was Ivor Perry-Pratt, who described himself as being in an oil-related industry. He supplied the offshore rigs with nonslip rubber treads for ladders and walkways. It seemed they wore out very quickly or else perished in the wet and cold conditions. Business was good, but Ivor Perry-Pratt always wondered. Will it last? He sympathized somewhat with the railwaymen.

His friend Eric Husker said, "They ought to sack the whole lot of them."

Husker was in earth-moving equipment. Aberdeen was the fastest-growing city in Britain.

"That's too drastic," Mr. Perry-Pratt said.

"Rubbish. It's not drastic at all," Mr. Husker said. "And it will come—you'll see! This will either be a fully automated railway or it won't exist at all. Ivor, be reasonable. A few years ago there were twenty-five farm laborers on every farm. Now how many are there?"

Mr. Perry-Pratt pleaded, "But look at unemployment!"

Mr. Husker was implacable. He said, "We'll have to have a lot more unemployment before this country begins to run properly."

Of course, he had a job.

We reached the coast. Offshore, a four-legged oil rig looked like a mechanical sea monster defecating in shallow water. It was like a symbol of this part of Scotland. Aberdeen was the most prosperous city on the British coast—the healthiest finances, the brightest future, the cleanest buildings, the briskest traders. But that was not the whole of it. I came to hate Aberdeen more than any other place I saw. Yes, yes, the streets were clean; but it was an awful city.

Perhaps it had been made awful and was not naturally that way. It had certainly been affected by the influx of money and foreigners. I guessed that in the face of such an onslaught the Aberdonians had found protection and solace by retreating into the most unbearable Scottish stereotypes. It was only in Aberdeen that I saw kilts and eightsome reels and the sort of tartan tightfistedness that made me think of the average Aberdonian as a person who would gladly pick a halfpenny out of a dunghill with his teeth.

Most British cities were plagued by unemployed people. Aberdeen was plagued by workers. It made me think that work created more stress in a city than unemployment. At any rate, this sort of work. The oil industry had the peculiar social disadvantage of being almost entirely manned by young single men with no hobbies. The city was swamped with them. They were lonely. They prowled twilit streets in groups, miserably looking for something to do. They were far away from home. They were like soldiers in a strange place. There was nothing for them to do in Aberdeen but drink. I had the impression that the Aberdonians hated and feared them.

These men had seen worse places. Was there in the whole world an oil-producing country that was easygoing and economical? "You should see Kuwait," a welder told me; "you should see Qatar." For such a man Aberdeen was civilization. It was better than suffering in an oil rig a hundred miles offshore. And anyone who had been in the Persian Gulf had presumably learned to do without a red-light district. Apart from drinking and dancing Scottish reels, there was not a single healthy vice available in Aberdeen.

It had all the extortionate high prices of a boom town but none of the compensating vulgarity. It was a cold, stony-faced city. It did not even look prosperous. That was some measure of the city's mean spirit—its wealth remained hidden. It looked overcautious, unwelcoming and smug, and a bit overweight, like a rich uncle in dull sensible clothes, smelling of mildew and ledgers, who keeps his wealth in an iron chest in the basement. The windows and doors of Aberdeen were especially solid and unyielding; it was a city of barred windows and burglar alarms, of hasps and padlocks and Scottish nightmares.

The boom town soon discovers that it is possible to make money out of nothing. It was true of the Klondike, where, because women were scarce, hags came to regard themselves as great beauties and demanded gold dust for their grunting favors; in Saudi Arabia today a gallon of water costs more than a gallon of motor oil. In Aberdeen it was hotel rooms. The Station Hotel, a dreary place on the dockside road across from the railway station, charged £48 a night for a single room, which was more than its equivalent would have cost at the Plaza in New York City. Most of the other hotels charged between £25 and £35 a night—fifty bucks on average—and the rooms did not have toilets. I went from place to place with a sense of mounting incredulity, for the amazing thing was not the high prices or the sleazy conditions but rather the fact that there were no spare rooms.

For what I calculated to be $40 I found a hotel room that was like a jail cell—narrow and dark, with a dim light fifteen feet high on the ceiling. There was no bathroom. The bed was the size of a camp cot. Perhaps if I had just spent three months on an oil rig I would not have noticed how dismal it was. But I had been in other parts of Scotland, where they did things differently, and I knew I was being fleeced.

To cheer myself up I decided to go out on the town. I found a joint called Happy Valley—loud music and screams. I thought: Just the ticket.

But the doorman blocked my path and said, "Sorry, you can't go in."

Behind him were jumping, sweating people and the occasional splash of breaking glass.

"You've not got a jacket and tie," he said.

I could not believe this. I looked past him, into the pandemonium.

"There's a man in there with no shirt," I said.

"You'll have to go, mate."

I suspected that it was my oily hiker's shoes that he really objected to, and I hated him for it.

I said, "At least I'm wearing a shirt."

He made a monkey noise and shortened his neck. "I'm telling you for the last time."

"Okay, I'm going. I just want to say one thing," I said. "You're wearing one of the ugliest neckties I've ever seen in my life."

Up the street another joint was advertising "Country and Western Night." I hurried up the stairs, toward the fiddling.

"Ye canna go in," the doorman said. "It's too full."

"I see people going in," I said. They were drifting past me.

"And we're closing in a wee munnit."

I said, "I don't mind."

"And you're wearing blue jeans," he said.

"And you're wearing a wrinkled jacket," I said. "And what's that, a gravy stain?"

"Ye canna wear blue jeans here. Regulations."

"Are you serious? I can't wear blue jeans to an evening of country and western music?"

"Ye canna."

I said, "How do you know I'm not Willie Nelson?"

He jabbed me hard with his stubby finger and said, "You're nae Wullie Nullson, now piss off!"

And so I began to think that Aberdeen was not my kind of place. But was it anyone's kind of place? It was fully employed and tidy and virtuous, but it was just as bad as any of the poverty-stricken places I had seen—worse, really, because it had no excuses. The food was disgusting, the hotels overpriced and indifferent, the spit-and-sawdust pubs were full of drunken and bad-tempered men—well, who wouldn't be? And it was not merely that it was expensive and dull; much worse was its selfishness. Again, it was the boom town ego. Nothing else mattered but its municipal affairs. The newspapers ignored the Israeli invasion of Lebanon and the United Nations initiative on the Falklands and the new space shuttle. Instead, their headlines concentrated on the local moneymaking stuff—the new industries, the North Sea pipeline about to be laid, the latest oil rigs. The world hardly existed, but financial news, used cars, and real estate took up seven pages of the daily paper.

The Aberdeen American, a fortnightly paper, had the self-conscious gusto of a church newsletter. It was a hotchpotch of news about barbecues, schools, American primary elections, and features with an Anglo-American connection. It was a reminder that the American community in Aberdeen was large. The American School had three premises. I heard American voices on the buses. And I was certain that it was the Americans who patronized the new health clubs—weight-loss emporiums and gymnasiums with wall-to-wall carpets. A lovely granite church had been gutted and turned into the Nautilus Total Fitness Centre.

On a quiet street in the western part of the city was the American Foodstore. I went there out of curiosity, wondering what sort of food Americans viewed as essential to their well-being on this savage shore. My findings were: Crisco, Thousand Island Dressing, Skippy Peanut Butter, Cheerios, Pepperidge Farm Frozen Blueberry Muffins, Bama Brand Grape Jelly, Mama's Frozen Pizza, Swanson's Frozen Turkey TV Dinner, Chef Boyardee Spaghetti Sauce, El Paso Taco Sauce, and Vermont Pancake Syrup. I also noted stacks of Charmin Toilet Paper, Budweiser Beer, and twenty-five-pound bags of Purina Dog Chow.

None of it was good food, and it was all vastly inferior to the food obtainable locally, which cost less than half as much. But my experience of Aberdeen had shown me that foreigners were treated with suspicion, and it was quite understandable that there was a sense of solidarity to be had from being brand-loyal. Crisco and Skippy were part of being an American—and, in the end, so was Charmin Toilet Paper. I imagined that to an American in Aberdeen imported frozen pizza was more than a cultural necessity—it was also a form of revenge.

"Isn't there anything you like about Aberdeen?" Mr. Muir asked imploringly, as we waited on the platform at Guild Street Station for the train to Dundee. I had spent ten minutes enumerating my objections, and I had finished by saying that I never wanted to see another boom town again. What about the cathedral, the university, the museum—hadn't I thought the world of them?

"No," I said.

He looked appalled.

I said, "But I liked the bakeries. The fresh fish. The cheese."

"The bakeries," Mr. Muir said sadly.

I did not go on. He thought there was something wrong with me. But what I liked in Aberdeen was what I liked generally in Britain: the bread, the fish, the cheese, the flower gardens, the apples, the clouds, the newspapers, the beer, the woolen cloth, the radio programs, the parks, the Indian restaurants and amateur dramatics, the postal service, the fresh vegetables, the trains, and the modesty and truthfulness of people. And I liked the way Aberdeen's streets were frequently full of seagulls.

21. The 9:51 to Leuchars Junction

IT WAS a mild meadowy coast for seventy miles, from the mouth of the Dee to the mouth of the Tay—Aberdeen to Dundee. I had hoped to walk part of it, keeping to the clifftops and avoiding the deep cuts and gullies and the dark promontories. I liked the way the shaggy grass hung into the coves from the cliff edge. Today that grass was streaming and even the sea was flattened by the falling rain. The storm brightened the stone on the snug coastal cottages and gave it the color of snail shells.

Stonehaven was visibly prosperous, which was odd, because most well-off Scottish towns tried to hide their prosperity. We skirted the town's pretty bay, turned inland for perhaps twenty miles, and then returned to the coast at Montrose, which lay on a landspit in front of a large tidal lagoon, Montrose Basin. Slouching cows searched for grass near the apartment houses at Montrose, and farther south at Lunan Bay a hundred hogs in the field were suddenly illuminated by a gleam of sunshine through the draperies of the downpour. The light also reddened a nearby castle ruin and briefly warmed the sands of the bay.

The gale surged again, with mares' tails off Arbroath, and it swept across the Front. But I imagined it to be a joyless place even in full sunshine. The coast had turned duney. In Scotland it was either black cliffs or gray links, and sometimes for miles it was bleak attenuated golf courses, end to end in the sand. Scottish golf courses were never pretty things: they were windy and lacked topsoil; they were oddly lumpy, scattered with rabbit holes and bomb craters; they looked like minefields. Carnoustie was that way—battlescarred—and so was Barry. And then we came to Monifieth, where three tall swans were swimming in the sea.

I chose to stop at Dundee because it had a reputation for dullness ("possesses little of interest for the tourist"). Such places were usually worth seeing. I had found that in Britain less was revealed by the lovely old town than the ugly new one. Old Dundee had been destroyed, and new Dundee was an interesting monstrosity. It was certainly an excellent example of a hard-edged horror—the prison-like city of stony-faced order—that I associated with the future. Just the word futuristic brought to my mind the most depressing images of idle crowds and ugly buildings, unfriendly streets, steel fences, barred windows, and defoliation; and it was bound up with the concept of organized leisure—the intimidating symmetry of group fun. Public swimming pools were futuristic.

There had always seemed to me something uncomfortable and dangerous about public swimming pools. Their tiles had a particularly frightening way of turning a shout into a scream, and this noise and the water and the cold showers and the nakedness could make a swimming pool seem like Auschwitz. Rowdy gangs loved to swim—the atmosphere of a pool brought out a bullying streak in them.

The Dundee Swimming and Leisure Centre had the look of a Russian interrogation headquarters, a vast drab Lubyanka in rain-streaked concrete. Inside were three crowded pools, and one was Olympic-sized. They contained a stew of thousands of screaming kids. The building smelled of human flesh and disinfectant; it steamed like a locker room; it was damp in a sickening way. It had a dark cafeteria and a Therapy Suite containing sunlamps and sauna baths ("OAP's Sauna—80 pence"). There were a number of Ping-Pong tables in one room, but no one was playing. In the lobby there were four electronic games being frantically played—boys feeding money into Space Invaders and Frogger and Moon Landing while the single parents and the pensioners and the unemployed came and went. It was in the metropolitan plan, in a world where there was no work and no money but plenty of time; it was part of the process of life in the years to come.

***

Leuchars Junction was no longer a junction, though the name had stuck. It lay across the Firth of Tay, in Fife. It was as near as I could get by rail to St. Andrews ("perhaps the most fashionable watering place in the country"), and I began walking as soon as I arrived at the station.

After a mile or so I came to Guardbridge. Some men were standing in front of the paper mill there. They said they were waiting for a funeral to go past—a man who had worked his whole life at the paper mill was being buried today. The hearse was overdue.

"And I'll tell you something," one of the men said. His name was Gordon Hastie and he was fairly agitated, twisting his cloth cap in his hands as he peered up the St. Andrews Road. "Do you see those flags?"

There were three on the flagpoles in front of the factory—a Union Jack, the Scottish national flag, and what I took to be the paper mill's own flag—all flying at half-mast.

"What a morning it's been," Mr. Hastie said. "A couple of hours ago we had to raise those flags for Queenie. Then after she went by we had to lower them again for Donald."

Donald was the dead man, obviously, but who was Queenie?

"The Queen herself," Mr. Hastie said. "Aye."

"You mean the Queen's here?"

"In St. Andrews," Mr. Hastie said. "Hurry up, you might see her."

Just as I started to run, Donald's hearse went by. I froze. The paper mill men doffed their caps. And then the funeral cars continued down the wet road, and the men went back to work.

It was four miles more to St. Andrews. I walked fast and after a few miles I cut across a field, continuing along the estuary of the River Eden, ending up in the middle of a golf course. There were four golf courses here, but the one I found myself in belonged to the Royal and Ancient Golf Club of St. Andrews, the capital of the golfing world. The course was just as rough and desolate as every other one I had seen in Scotland. Perhaps that was the point of golf?

But there was not a town its size in Britain to compare with St. Andrews, and it was one of the most beautiful towns on the coast, the white stone ruins and the brown stone buildings perched on the rocky cliffs of a wide bay. The golf courses ran into the seafront, and the seafront was part of the playing fields of the university, which was a third of the town; but it was impossible to tell where one ended and the other began. The whole effect was somewhat ecclesiastical, but with fresh air, like a lively cloister with the roof off.

Today the streets were scrubbed, flags flew, the whole town gleamed with flowers and bunting. And there was a heightened hum, a vibration racing in the air, the equivalent in sound of twinkling light, something electric and almost visible. It was genuine. I felt it as soon as I entered the cobbled streets. It was as if the town had been refreshed with a blessing. In a way it had, for that atmosphere was the spirit left by the progress of the Royal Visit. The Queen of England had left just a moment ago.

"What a pity you missed her," Freda Robertson said. Mrs. Robertson owned the largest bookstore in St. Andrews, and she looked dignified and indestructible in her Scottish way, her voice half-inquiry and half-reprimand and full of the precise ironies of a headmistress. She loved books. She recognized me. Did I want a cup of tea?

With her finger tracing upon the sharp panes of her mullioned window, Mrs. Robertson described how Her Majesty rode up here in her Rolls-Royce, and got out there, and walked over there near the barriers.

"I hung out of the window with a pair of binoculars and my camera," Mrs. Robertson said. "I didn't know which one to look through. I'm sure my pictures will have fingers and thumbs on them. But you should have heard the cheers!"

Was this Falklands feeling, I wondered? No, Freda Robertson said, it was for the Queen's being a grandmother. The child had been born when I was in Mallaig, and now he had a name: Prince William. One of the largest St. Andrews signs said, health to PRINCE WILLIAM.

"What brings you to St. Andrews?" Mrs. Robertson asked.

I said that I was making my way around the British coast, clockwise.

"Aye, so we're on your itinerary."

"And a man in Guardbridge told me that the Queen was here."

It was then that Mrs. Robertson said what a pity it was that I had missed her. "Her Majesty just left for Anstruther."

That was only eight miles away and also on the coast.

I said, "I think I'll go to Anstruther and see her."

"I hope you do see her," Mrs. Robertson said. "This is a great occasion. Do you know that this is the first time the Queen and Prince Philip have ever come to St. Andrews?"

"Ever?"

"Aye," Mrs. Robertson said. "Now I want you to do me one favor, if you will."

"Gladly," I said.

She went on, "As you're traveling around the British coast, so you say, you are seeing a great many places. I have never been to half those places, and I don't suppose I shall. What I want you to do is write me a nonfiction book about traveling around the British coast. I think it would do very well in my shop, but that's not the important thing. I mean to say, I want to read it."

I said I would do my best, and started toward Anstruther, thinking: That was a page, and here's another page, and there's probably a page in Anstruther.

I tried to hitchhike in order to get to Anstruther in time to see the Queen, but no one picked me up. I fell in with a farm laborer on the road. He was coming from St. Andrews. He had gone there for the Royal Visit.

"I saw the Queen," he said, and he winced, remembering.

"How did she look?"

He winced again. His name was Dougie. He wore gumboots. He said, "She were deep in thought."

Dougie had seen something no one else had.

"She were preoccupied. Her face were gray. She weren't happy."

I said, "I thought she was happy about her new grandson."

Dougie disagreed. "I think she were worried about something. They do worry, you know. Aye, it's a terrible job."

He began to walk slowly, as if in sympathy for the hard-pressed Queen.

I said, "Being Queen of England has its compensations."

"Some compensations and some disadvantages," Dougie said. "I say it's half a dream world and half a nightmare. It's a goldfish bowl. No privacy! She can't pick her nose without someone seeing her."

Dougie said this in an anguished way, and I thought it was curious, though I did not say so, that he was pained because the monarch could not pick her nose without being observed.

He then began to talk about television programs. He said his favorite program was "The Dukes of Hazzard," which concerned hijinks in a town in the American South. This Scottish farm laborer in Fifeshire said that he liked it because of the way the character Roscoe talked to his boss. That was very funny. American humor was hard to understand at times, he said, but every farm laborer in Scotland would find Roscoe funny for his attitude.

At last a bus came. I flagged it down. It was empty. I said I wanted to go to Anstruther to see the Queen.

"Aye. She's having lunch there," the driver said.

I wondered where.

The driver knew. "At the Craw's Nest. It's a small hotel on the Pittenweem Road."

He dropped me farther along and I followed the bunting into Anstruther, sensing that same vibrant glow that I had felt at St. Andrews—the royal buzz. It was a holiday atmosphere. The schools were out. The shops were closed. The pubs were open. Some men were wearing kilts. People were talking in groups, seeming to remind each other of what had just happened—the Queen had already gone by, to the Craw's Nest.

I cut across the harbor sands and went up the road to what seemed a very ordinary hotel—but freshly painted and draped in lines of plastic Union Jacks. There were more men in kilts here—they had such wonderfully upright posture, the men in kilts: they never slouched and hardly ever sat down.

"She just left," one said. His name was Hector Hay McKaye.

But there was something of her still here, like perfume that is strongest when a woman leaves suddenly. In the Queen's case it was like something overhead—still up there, an echo.

Mr. McKaye turned to his friends and said, "They had two detectives in the kitchen—"

"Do you want to see the flowers?" Mrs. Hamilton said.

Everyone was whispering excitedly.

It seemed to me that if the Queen and Prince Philip had eaten here, the food might be good. I seldom had a good meal in my traveling, not that it mattered much: food was one of the dullest subjects. I decided to stay the night at the Craw's Nest. And this hotel, which had just received the blessing of a Royal Visit, was a great deal cheaper than any hotel in Aberdeen.

"She never had a starter," the waitress Eira said. "She had the fish course, haddock Mornay. Then roast beef, broccoli, and carrots. And fresh strawberries and cream for dessert. Our own chef did it. It was a simple meal—it was good. The menu was printed and had bits of gold foil around it."

Much was made of the good plain food. It was English food—a fish course, a roast, two boiled vegetables, and fruit for the sweet course. The middle-class families in Anstruther—and everywhere else—had that every Sunday for lunch. She's just like us, people said of the Queen; of course, she works a jolly sight harder!

What was difficult for an alien to see was that this was essentially a middle-class monarchy. Decent philistines, the royal couple liked animals and country-house sports and variety shows. They never mentioned books at all, but they were famous for preferring certain television programs. Newspapers had published photographs of the Royal Television Set: it had a big screen and a sort of shawl on the top, but it was just like one you could hire for two quid a week up the High Street. Over the years the Queen had become shrewder-seeming, an even-tempered mother-in-law and a kindly gran. Prince Philip was loved for being irascible. He was noted for his grouchy remarks. He used the word bloody in public, and after that it was hard for anyone to find fault with him. The Queen was his opposite, growing smaller and squashier as he seemed to lengthen and grow spiky—the illusion had sprung out of his having become vocal. The Queen and the Prince were well-matched, but it was less the sovereign and her consort than the double-act that all successful middle-class marriages are.

In the lobby they were selling souvenirs of the Royal Visit. How had they had time to prepare these paperweights and medallions and letter openers and postcards saying Craw's Nest Hotel—Souvenir of the Royal Visit?

"We knew about it in January, but we had to keep it a secret until May," Eira said. "We kept praying that nothing would go wrong. We thought the Falklands might finish it."

So they had been putting the place in order and running up souvenirs for almost seven months. The royal lunch had lasted an hour.

That night they held a celebration party in the hotel parking lot. It was a way of giving thanks. The hotel invited the whole town, or rather two—Easter Anstruther and Wester Anstruther. They had a rock band and eight pipers and some drummers. The racket was tremendous and continued until two o'clock in the morning, hundreds of people drinking and dancing. They sold sausages and fish and chips, and there were bales of hay for people to sit on. The band was bad, but no one seemed to mind. There were old people, families, drunks, and dogs. Small boys smoked cigarettes in a delighted way and sneaked beer from the hotel. Girls danced with each other, because the village boys, too embarrassed to be seen dancing, congregated in small groups and pretended to be tough. There was a good feeling in the air, hilarity and joy, something festive, but also grateful and exhausted. It wasn't faked; it was like the atmosphere of an African village enjoying itself.

At eleven I took a walk down to the beach. I passed a man in rubber waders standing alone and looking puzzled on the road. A girl and her grandmother were eating ice cream cones in the half-dark. I passed a cottage; inside, a family of five was singing out loud. I saw more children smoking behind a wall. In another house a man and woman seemed to be proposing a toast. There was moonlight on the water, and this moonglow had settled on the waves and made them stand out like the ribs of a washboard. I walked toward this light, and on the stony beach, just below the seawall where I was standing, a boy was clumsily fucking a girl, his buttocks plum-blue under the bright moon and her upraised legs almost luminous and seeming to steady him. It was chilly, he was having a little trouble, but he was so eager, he did not see me. They made me feel invisible, but I left them there and I thought of the band and the dancing and beer and the hay bales and the moonlight and the smell of seaweed and the young couple fucking where the Queen had just been—it was like a mural, an allegorical painting, but a funny one, a Gully Jimson or a Stanley Spencer.

The cleaning ladies were buzzing early the next morning.

"I couldn't believe it," Mrs. Ross said. "It didn't seem real. It was like a dream."

I said, "What will Willie Hamilton think?"

Willie Hamilton was their Member of Parliament and noted for being in favor of abolishing the monarchy.

"Willie Hamilton can get stuffed."

After breakfast, I set off for Leven. It was a gray morning, and rather chilly. After I had walked a few miles, it began to rain. I kept walking and heard a throstle, as it was called here. Then the rain was too much for me. I hurried to a village and waited for the bus to Leven. The villages on the coast of Fife had a quiet beauty, and the farmhouses and barns were built like fortresses in flat stone.

On the way to Leven we stopped at Largo. "Alexander Selkirk, the original of Robinson Crusoe, was born here in 1676." There was a statue of Selkirk in front of his birthplace, a cottage in Lower Largo.

"Its proper name is the Seatoun of Largo," a man next to me said. He had just boarded the bus, and we began talking about Largo and Selkirk. The man said, "Alexander Selkirk was a rogue! He was no good at all!"

I said that I had read somewhere that Selkirk had once kicked his mother and father downstairs.

"Aye, a rogue," the man said. "And I'm a direct descendant of his, on my mother's side of the family."

The man's name was David Gillis. He was ninety years old. It seemed my fate to be quite often encountering very old men. But it was these buses and trains—the old men didn't drive, didn't own cars, and I ran into them traveling. I was glad of it. David Gillis was bright-eyed and his hearing was fine. He could have been seventy or so. He was going to Leven to do a little shopping.

I was always interested to know what work these people had done. What had Gillis done seventy-five years ago, at the age of fifteen?

"I was apprenticed to a plumber in Largo and earned half a crown a week"—about twenty cents. "But it wasn't just plumbing I had to learn—all plumbers were tinsmiths and bell-hangers. I got my first job in 1906. I was offered a pound a week by a man in Largo, but I turned it down. I went to Glasgow and got two pounds. You see, the country employers used to take advantage of us."

He stayed in Glasgow for some years and eventually went to London, where his skills were in demand.

"Nowadays, plumbing is easy. You put in the pipes and the pump does all the work. But in those days we didn't have pumps. That made it very tricky work, because the flow had to be just right. And bell-hanging was a delicate thing. There was a bell in every room in the big houses. They worked on wires—no electrics at all. Bing went the bell and it would register on a panel downstairs, where the servants were. Bell-hanging was quite an art. No one does it now."

In 1941, Mr. Gillis' doctor in London said, "If you want your wife to live, you'll get her out of here." Her nerves were bad, and German bombs were tearing into the city. People asked him why he had come back to Largo, but he always said that if they spent two nights together in London with those bombs, they wouldn't ask.

In the mid-sixties the railway to Largo closed. It was the worst thing that had ever happened in this part of Fife. The end of the railway was the end of the village.

"It was a terrible thing," Mr. Gillis said. "Now we're twelve miles from a railway station, and the bus is awful. Some days it doesn't come at all. And it's getting worse. If I miss the bus, I have to wait hours in Leven. And there's nothing to do there—Leven is more dead than alive."

There had been a railway through Largo and all the way to Crail and St. Andrews, Mr. Gillis said. The buses had not replaced it, and who had the money to run a car?

Mr. Gillis, at ninety, was surprised at how slow and difficult it was for anyone to get from place to place these days. Years ago it had been very easy.

He confirmed my feeling that great parts of Britain were turning into what they were before the railway age. Villages were becoming crabbed and shrunken, and businesses were closing, and the people who stayed in rural areas became more and more tied to their houses. The urban areas were growing in population and becoming poorer, like Leven, the last stop. Areas of high unemployment like this had a distinctively sooty look and woeful air—not much traffic but plenty of people on the sidewalks. In these poor towns the people walked rather slowly.

In a report on Kirkcaldy, eight miles farther along the coast, half the sample of unemployed people described "wandering along the High Street" as a regular activity. They did not leave Kirkcaldy ("birthplace of Adam Smith, author of The Wealth of Nations"), because bus fares were too high. They could not afford to look for jobs elsewhere. I had bought a copy of this report. It was called Biding Time and subtitled "Reflections of unemployed young people in Kirkcaldy, 1982." Reflections was the wrong word. They were not particularly alarmed by the lack of work available. Unemployment was so common, there was no stigma attached to it; it was accepted as a permanent condition. The report noted that few of the young people expressed a "desperate willingness to do 'anything.'" There was always the dole and, for pleasure, the High Street to wander along. And while several were angry at their inability to find jobs, others had their own solutions: "One person was thinking about emigrating; one expected a prison sentence soon..."

I had passed East and West Wemyss ("so called because of the numerous large 'weems' or caves... along this coast") and some defunct coal fields. I would have stayed in Kirkcaldy if it had seemed a desperate place, but it was more dull than desperate. I made a tour of the town and then continued past the small windy resort at Burnt-island and along canyons of junk and discarded cars near the cliffs at Inverkeithing. But this junkyard was also part of the embankment of the Firth of Forth, and if you turned your back on this ramshackle shore, which was like a mortal wound in Scotland's side, there was a grand view of ships and water and the Forth Bridge.

Edinburgh was the next stop, but it was not on my coastal itinerary. It was, in atmosphere, an inland city, and now that the port of Leith was moribund, it hardly counted as important to shipping. But it was a handsome place still, a city of black crags and old solemn tenements of slate rising to a castle that looked like a dark drum on a cliff. Wind gusted up its steep alleys. What was now grass and railway tracks in a ravine beside Princes Street had once been a loch. It was the most beautiful city in Britain and one of the must-beautiful in Europe. It looked as if it were the setting of great intrigues and passionate vice, but I knew it to be a quiet indoor city inhabited by private souls who lived in narrow seclusion.

In Edinburgh I was told that a railway strike was looming and that in three or four days there would not be a single train running in Britain. This event was not viewed with much passion by the general public. The sort of punishing strike that created misery in other countries was met in Britain with either excitement—a kind of community thrill at the drama of it—or else indifference. The British were fatalistic; it was the origin of their cynicism, but it also made them good sharers of misfortune. "Oh, well, mustn't grumble!"

I hurried to North Berwick, which lay on a corner of land between the Firth of Forth and the North Sea, and from here I walked to Dunbar, spending a whole day making detours. I had seen Dunbar from the train as it sped by, and I had liked the look of it, so I took this chance to stop there. The harbor was on a bleak and rocky bay, faced by rotting ramparts and collapsing red stone walls. The old buildings in Dunbar were also made of this red stone and the High Street was fifty yards wide. But it was a lifeless place and a little sad on this cold day in July. I debated whether to stay the night or head for the border. On these long summer evenings there was always plenty of time to decide.

I was reluctant to leave Scotland—I had liked nearly everyone I had met. But then in Dunbar I met a loudmouth named Billy Crombie. He was traveling south and had stopped to drink three pints of beer. He was a Glaswegian, with a mustache as large as a ferret and a cowering wife. His face was purple; he drove a Jaguar.

"I'm going to a foreign country!" he declared. "Aye, England—it's a foreign land! Scotland's ruled by the bloody English. They dropped Exchange Control so that they could spend our money abroad—they don't spend it in Scotland, though they stole it from us in the first place by stealing our oil resairves. And you bloody Yanks have atomic bombs a few miles from Glasgow, and nuclear subs in Holy Loch! Why don't you put them in London, that's what I want to know. Don't mention politicians. They're beyond a joke. David Steel is a Unionist! Tam Dalyell is a carpetbagger! Jenkins is a Tory—it was an Orange seat and they ran a Catholic to oppose him—how could he lose? I'm a freedom fighter—don't let these tweeds fool you. You can ask my wife, if you don't believe I'm a freedom fighter. Now, listen, go home and tell them we don't want your bombs!"

I headed south on the train, with his voice still ringing in my ears. Scotland ended at the tiny coastal village of Lamberton, the Northumbrian border, below Lammermuir and the hills of black-faced sheep.

22. The Last Train to Whitby

"IT WUNT RAIN, LAD," Mr. Yeaver the joiner said to me at Berwick-upon-Tweed. "The clouds is too high. The swallows is flying too high."

I had decided to walk to Lindisfarne—Holy Island—at low tide. The Venerable Bede had called it a "semi-isle" twelve hundred years ago. It was still a semi-isle—"accessible at low water, but it is necessary to be acquainted with the quicksands which are dangerous."

Mr. Yeaver said, "I used to work there. I had a joinery. But I lived in Spittal."

That was right across the Tweed. Spittal was an old word for hospital. There were seven Spittals in Britain.

"How did you get out to the island?"

"Pony and trap." It sounded as medieval as the word spittal, but Yeaver was my own age.

He said I could take a bus to a certain public house, and then it was a seven-mile walk. When I started away, he spoke up again.

'They're strange people out there," Mr. Yeaver said. "They're like people with their own different language. And they hate outsiders."

I thanked him for this information and caught the bus to the public house and then walked down a country lane to the shore. I faced an expanse of bubbling mudflats, some of it marked with poles showing the Pilgrims' Way; to the left of this was a narrow causeway. There was a bridge some distance out with a sign on it saying, this bridge is totally submerged at high tide. It was a sunny day, with a light breeze off the North Sea. (Seventy years ago it was called the German Ocean.) I started across the Pilgrims' Way, looking back every so often to see my footprints fill with water. The imprint sank, as if in quicksand, so I made for the causeway. Ahead, Lindisfarne was an island of low straggling dunes, with white houses and red stone ruins at its extreme end. It was banked by sand and it lay in a tide of mud; for half the day it was a village in the sea.

This offshore stroll to the island was one of the most pleasant walks I made on the coast—a memorable mile. The ruins that had been painted by Turner and William Daniell still stood. The sand gleamed. The priory ruins in shadow were silver-black like charcoal, with the same frail sculpted look of burned wood, but where the daylight struck them they were as red and porous as cake. The surface color of the island was the yellow-gray of human skin, and farther off there was a castle wrapped around a solitary high rock. It was exciting to walk across the silty sea bed with nothing but this island in view under a towering sky.

Most offshore islands have an atmosphere of shipboard isolation, with the sea all around. But on Holy Island I felt a sense of being on board a ship that was moored on a long hawser, occasionally drifting to sea and occasionally bumping the shore. The village was small but had a number of cozy hotels. I had no trouble finding a bed or a good meal. I sketched pictures of the strange Lindisfarne boat sheds—the hulls of boats cut crosswise and turned over. They were storehouses, but they looked like beached whales or sea monsters. There was a path just above the high-water mark that went entirely around the island, passing the Links, full of darting rabbits, and carrying on to a sandy promontory called the Snook. It was a restful island and even seemed to have an air of sanctity—something about its flatness and the way the wind murmured softly across the dunes.

The islanders were watchful but not unfriendly. Yet Yeaver had been right on one score. Their accent was incomprehensible to me, a mixture of Scottish and Geordie, with a kind of Gaelic gargle. They did some fishing, but their income was derived from the people who visited the island. They sold postcards and ice cream cones and offered tours of the ruins. Most people raced to the island in cars at low tide, and raced back to the mainland again before the causeway was flooded. Few people stayed the night, though it was a peaceful place to sleep.

***

There was a good view of Holy Island from the train, on the east coast line. It appeared about ten miles south of Berwick, and because it was such a long island, it stayed in view for a number of minutes. More castles and ruins emerged on the low shore of ancient meadows. This part of Northumberland was flat, and today it had a great dome of clouds—an amphitheater with a ceiling of detached cirrus filaments tufting high over a whitish veil of undulant fluff and, below that, decomposing quilts of loose cumulus—this country was cloudland.

I was on the train because the strike was nigh. Soon, people said, there would be no trains. They seemed to like this doomsday drama. They whispered about it at Widdrington and Morpeth ("scanty ruins ... and a curious clock-tower"). I had missed Amble-by-the-Sea—which sounded like a book title—and the Scars, but I did not have time to walk today. In any case, the speed of the train intensified the stains on the landscape and showed how quickly grassy pastures vanished into strange industrial cubism—rising chimneys and towers and the steel stick-figures of pylons, which made it almost zoolike, for the wires were crisscrossed against the sky, creating the impression of an enormous cage. This geometric clutter also suggested that we were rushing toward a populous place, and of course we were. It was the beginning of the great sad sprawl of the northeast of England, and even the riverine name of this poor county was like a laborious and demoralized sigh, Tyne and Wear. Newcastle was inland. I made for the coast.

This part of England had the highest rate of unemployment, and today in the sudden shower of rain at Jarrow ("whose name recalls unemployment and the hunger marches of the 20s") it had the poisoned and dispirited look of a place that had just lost a war. It was an area of complex ugliness—not just the dumps full of gulls and crows, and the weak defiance in the faces of the teen-agers I saw at Bolden Colliery; it was also the doomed attempts at survival: the farmer plowing a small strip of field behind an abandoned factory, and the garden allotments of shacks and overgrown enclosures, cabbages and beans, geese and pigs, vegetables and animals alike dusted with fine smut and looking cancerous. It was like a sight of China—black factories and narrow, necessary gardens, and a kind of visible hopelessness. It was one of the dreariest landscapes I had ever seen.

It was hideous and fascinating. We crossed the River Wear, and instead of continuing, I got off at Sunderland in order to verify its desolation. People said business was terrible, the place was dying on its feet. And Sunderland, because it was so depressed, had a dangerous look—the unrepaired buildings and the shabby streets, and the gangs of boys with spiky hair and long ragged coats or leather jackets painted over with fists and swastikas.

A man named Begbie who was a clerk at Binns Department Store said, "Some of the kids who left school six or seven years ago have never had a job. There are jobs in the paper, but these kids stay on the dole. They left school at sixteen and they developed what I call a dole-queue mentality. They're unemployable! They don't want to work, and they've discovered they don't really have to. They learned how to do without it. That's the main difference between the present and other times in British industrial history. We've produced a whole generation of kids who are unemployable!"

Begbie had a grudge, but though there may have been some truth in what he said, there really was no work here. I looked in the local paper at the want ads. Very few jobs were listed, and most of them asked for people with experience.

But Sunderland was not a lively nightmare of poverty. It was dark brown and depressed and enfeebled. It was threadbare, but it was surviving in a marginal way. The real horror of it took a while to sink in. It had stopped believing there would be any end to this emptiness. Its hellish aspect was the hardest to see and describe, because it had a sick imprisoned atmosphere: there was simply nothing to do there.

The weather made it worse. It was a summer afternoon but so stormy and dark that the street lamps were on, and so were the lights in the train. I moved south again on the coastal line toward Hartlepool. Even the sea was grim here—not rough, but motionless and oily, a sort of offshore soup made of sewage and poison. We passed the coal-mining town of Seaham, with its pits next to the sea and the shafts going under the sea floor. The house roofs were like flights of steps on the sloping coast and the slag heaps had rivulets scored into them from the drizzling rain. It was a completely man-made landscape, a deliberate monstrosity of defilement. It was as different and strange as a coastal town could possibly be, with the sooty symmetry of a colliery grafted on to the shore. I had never seen anything like it in my life, and oddest of all were the people—small children laughing in a barren playground, and families picnicking on the foul-looking shore, and a glimpse between the crusted roofs of men playing cricket in spotless white flannels.

I wondered in Hartlepool how people could stand to live in such a place. Mine was not the breezy condescension of a traveler but a sense of puzzlement at the state of decay. For most people there was no choice, but I also guessed that what made it bearable was the English people's habit of living indoors most of the time. They loved squashy sofas and warm rooms and the prospect of tea. What difference did it make that the town's graveyard was squeezed between the cement works and the metal-box factory, and that the steelworks that had disfigured half the town were now shut, and the rest of the place was just cranes and pipelines and Chinese allotments? Everyone agreed that it looked like a dog's dinner.

"You've got soup kitchens in the States," a man named Witton said to me. This was in Hartlepool. Witton was a self-employed decorator. He hadn't worked since Easter. "It's much worse in the States. I saw a program about it on the telly."

But Richard Jellyman, a traveler for Morgan Crucibles, told me that when he came up north he always made a list of people to see. Inevitably, half of them would have gone into liquidation between his trips. Recently he had made a list of nine places to go in Leeds—prospective clients or people he had done business with in the past. He found, on arriving in Leeds that week, that eight of them had gone bankrupt.

I came to Stockton. The railway station was very grand; this was understandable: the first public railway in the world steamed down this line in 1825. But Stockton seemed just as terrible as every other town I had seen in this area. At Middlesbrough I was told that if I was smart, I would look at the auctions in the newspaper. Each time a company went bankrupt, it auctioned everything—machinery, chairs, lights, desks, everything. I could get them at a good price and sell them in London. Out of curiosity I checked the newspaper and found it to be full of bankruptcy auctions.

"It's the blacks, see," a respectable-looking man named Strawby told me. "We whites are the original inhabitants of this country, but they make all the laws in favor of the blacks. That's why it's all gone bad."

Mr. Strawby saw me making notes. He was not alarmed. He gave me a little lecture on racial characteristics and offered me tea.

"You can get a soobstantial tea here," Mr. Strawby said at a Middlesbrough cafe, and handed me the tattered menu.

Chip-butty: a bread sandwich filled with fried potatoes. Pease pudding: green oatmeal. Black pudding: dark knotted entrails fat with pig's blood. Faggots: hard shriveled sausages that looked like mummified slugs.

I said I wasn't hungry.

This made Mr. Strawby smile. "Soom people don't know what's good for them."

"And some people do," I said.

"Aye. That's true, right enough," Mr. Strawby said, and ordered a chip-butty.

***

STRIKE NIGHT, the Middlesbrough newspaper said and, in another Story, MAD KILLER LOOSE IN YORKSHIRE.

The Mad Killer overshadowed the railway strike. He was crazy and had a gun. He had already murdered three people, two of them policemen. There was particular anger directed against armed criminals in Britain, and cop-killers were especially hated, because few policemen were armed. People said, "Pretty soon it will be as bad as America, with all our policemen carrying guns." In Yorkshire the rural policemen carried nightsticks and rode bicycles and wore helmets that looked like old fire buckets. When they suspected foul play, they took out a little whistle and blew hard on it.

Barry Prudom, the killer, was psycho. He hated the police. It was said that he planned to wipe out the Yorkshire police force. He had been a commando. He knew how to live off the land. "Do not approach strangers," the police said in public warnings. They published Prudom's picture—he was unshaven, jug-eared, rather wolflike, and dark. HAVE YOU SEEN THIS MAN? the posters said. Four hundred people reported that they had. Every day there were fresh sightings. No one said his name. They said, "Haven't they caught that bloke yet?" People were giddy and talkative, excited by the danger. It was the classic example of the Mad Killer on the loose—a form of public theater.

Because of it, no one around here talked about the strike. This was very odd, because the entire railway network in Britain was shutting down tonight. I wanted to say But what about my trip?

Mr. Swales, the conductor on the 17:53 Middlesbrough-to-Whitby train, said, "They want to close this branch line. They've been trying to for years."

I thought: You might know! It was a beautiful line. But the opponents of these branch lines said that so few people used them, it would be cheaper to give the passengers taxi fare to their destination.

"This is the last train to Whitby," Mr. Swales said. "This is probably the last train to anywhere."

That was very British. The strike was not actually supposed to start until tomorrow, but the British impatience to wind a thing up—they characteristically left work early and always shooed the customers out of a store well before closing time—meant the strike would start this evening.

A fat lady named June Bagshawe said to Mr. Swales, "I don't know what I'm going to do without you!" She also shouted it into the guard's van and then out the window at every railway employee she saw. "I don't know what I'm going to do without you!" She used the train every day to get to her job at a knitting mill in Acklam.

But when she saw me, Mrs. Bagshawe hurried away heavily, pulling her legs along. And then I realized that, unshaven and square-faced and rather dark, I somewhat resembled Barry Prudom. I even had a knapsack like the former commando, and I wore commando-type oily shoes. She had taken me for the Mad Killer.

I sat alone. Ten minutes out of the gray trough of Middlesbrough, and this lovely train was passing through the green valleys of the Cleveland Hills in North Yorkshire. It was a bright evening—sunshine as soon as we were out of the city: it was like stepping out of a tent. All around the train were woods and fields and scarred hills, with trees blowing and earth the color of fudge. And at the rural station of Battersby ( What's a train doing here? you think, but it had once been a railway junction!) the wind was making the dog roses wag.

There is an English dream of a warm summer evening on a branch-line train. Just that sentence can make an English person over forty fall silent with the memory of what has now become a golden fantasy of an idealized England: the comfortable dusty coaches rolling through the low woods; the sun gilding the green leaves and striking through the carriage windows; the breeze tickling the hot flowers in the fields; birdsong and the thump of the powerful locomotive; the pleasant creak of the wood paneling on the coach; the mingled smells of fresh grass and coal smoke; and the expectation of being met by someone very dear on the platform of a country station.

It was like this tonight at Kildale and Commondale. The train halted in the depths of the countryside, the platform surrounded by daisies and buttercups, and the birds singing, and the leaves fluttering in the sunlight. A few people got out; no one got on. When the train pulled out of Castleton a small girl on the platform in a white dress put her fingers in her ears and stared with round eyes at the loud thing leaving.

There was great pride in the stations. At Glaisdale well-tended rosebushes rambled around the platform, and there were more at Egton and again at Sleights, and the train that had seemed miserable at Middlesbrough Station had been transformed, changing as it progressed up the line, growing emptier, brighter, more peaceful, and more powerful, until, where the River Esk widened just above Whitby, it seemed—the locomotive moving majestically through the dale—like the highest stage of civilization.

***

In Whitby, on its pair of steep cliffs, there was a sign saying vacancies in every guest house and every hotel. And yet the Horswills, Rose and Sid, were reluctant to give me a room in their hotel.

"My daughter said, 'If a single man comes for a room, don't let him in, Mum,'" Mrs. Horswill said nervously, still holding the door against me.

Mr. Horswill said, "There's this killer," and stared at my commando rucksack.

"You won't have any trouble finding a room in Whitby," Mrs. Horswill said. "Ordinarily, we'd be glad to put you up. It's just that—"

"I'm an American," I said.

"Come in," Mr. Horswill said, and forced the door out of his wife's hand. "We had Americans here in the war. They used to give us gum, lumps of steak, chops—they handed them out the window of their barracks. We went by and took them. Cigarettes—Lucky Strikes and that."

I asked him what the Americans had been doing in Whitby.

"Towing targets over the sea," Mrs. Horswill said, "and shooting at them from the cliffs."

Soon we were having cups of tea and reminiscing about the war and watching the news. The hunt for the Mad Killer was still on. "Police wish to interview Barry Prudom. They think he may be able to assist them with their enquiries."

"Wish to interview!" I said.

"Wish to kick in the goolies," Mr. Horswill said, and winked.

Mrs. Horswill said, "I hope he's not cummin garound to see us."

That was how she talked, slowly and methodically fracturing her words. "If you nee dennythink, just say so," she said, and "Toffees—do you wan tenny?" She said she cooked "everthin gone that menu" and that Sid helped with "the washin gup." She said I could settle my bill on the "morny gov departure" and that I could take my room key with me if I was "goin gout."

I was the only guest in their twenty-room hotel. "A lot of people left yesterday," Mr. Horswill said. "If it's not the strike, it's the killer. They were getting nervy." But I peeked into the register. Only one couple had been there in the past five days, the Hallwarks from Darlington. So Sid was just trying to put up a good front. Things will pick up next month, these hotel people always said. But it did not seem likely, and it could be creepy, having a meal alone in a dining room with nineteen empty tables. It was like Lahore at Ramadhan.

The Horswills had given me the smallest room in the place. I had asked for a single. This was a literal-minded country and not given to the expansive gesture. I was three flights up, in the back, one of the few five-pounders, and every other room was empty.

The weather turned bad on my second day. Whitby people claimed that the weather was always much worse north of here—in Newcastle and Berwick. Mrs. Horswill told me how, a month ago, a woman had been walking along the breakwater extension ot the harbor, and a gale sprang up and swept the woman into the sea.

"They spen tevver so much time looking for her, and when they found her, she were naked. The sea were so rough, it strip toff all her clothes."

Mrs. Horswill was a little morbid on this subject. She kept track' of the Whitby lifeboat, its comings and goings, its rescues and disasters, how many saved, how many drowned, and whether they were British. She sat at the window of her hotel on the cliff, always watching and usually knitting.

"Lifeboat's goin gout," she said.

It returned empty, she reported.

"Lifeboat's goin gout again," she said an hour later, and in the same breath, "'A Tribute to Frank Sinatra,'" and smiled at the television screen.

They loved him in England, the older folk. In places like Uggle barnby they knew all the words to "Chicago." American crooners were very popular: Bing Crosby, Perry Como, and singers I had never heard of, and of the most obscure they would say, "Of course his grandmother was English." And dancers—Fred Astaire, Ginger Rogers; and figure skaters—they knew the names of the American ones ("Bert and Betty Woofter—ever so graceful—they won a gold at Husqvarna"). And corny American musicals, and "Dallas," and Dixieland jazz; and in the depths of the English countryside country and western music was popular, the farm laborers had side-burns, and sometimes one saw—as I did in Whitby—a man of forty with a tattoo on his arm reading Elvis the King—R.I.P.

The day before I left Whitby I was sitting on a bench, staring in the direction of the beautiful ruined abbey, and a woman of about fifty, with a bow-legged dog, sat down and we started talking. Her name was Mrs. Lettsom and she had a boardinghouse in Whitby, but her real ambition was to move to Sandsend, a mile up the coast.

"The houses there are smashing," Mrs. Lettsom said. "They say the people are posh," she added sadly, "but I don't mind."

A three-bedroom house in Whitby cost about £22,000, and in Sandsend £34,000.

"But it's a dream," Mrs. Lettsom said. "I'll never have that kind of money." She was looking in the direction of Sandsend. Then she turned to me and said, "So what do you think about this bloke, going around killing people?"

***

I decided to walk to Scarborough, about twenty miles down the coast, on a footpath called the Cleveland Way. I slipped out of Horswill Heights, crossed the harbor, and climbed the stairs up East Cliff, where in Dracula Lucy Westenra ("I was waked by a flapping at the window") went sleep-walking and got the horrors. Now instead of a vampire there was a tent and caravan site there at Salt-wick Nab. It was not messy, but it was very ugly, and it occurred to me that such places were reduplications in canvas and tin of the neighborhoods the people had left, little canvas Smethwicks and tin Pudseys jammed together, with a pub, a shop, and a video shed in the center.

The coast was littered with black wrecks and stoved-in hulks, and this path had cracks in it—parts of it had already fallen into the sea, a hundred feet down.

There was a young woman ahead of me, walking alone but moving briskly. When I came abreast of her she asked me the time, and I took this to mean that she would not mind talking to me. Her name was Hazel, she was thirty, and she was walking to Robin Hood's Bay just for the hell of it. She had red cheeks and freckles; she was a jogger; her husband was in a fishing competition in Whitby. She was not interested in fishing (I never saw a woman in Britain holding either a fishing rod or a cricket bat). She had been married for two months.

"I live a strange life," she said.

I was delighted to hear this, but when she explained, it did not seem so strange. Both she and her husband worked at night, eight-thirty in the evening until six-thirty in the morning, four ten-hour days and then a long weekend, Friday to Sunday. Henry worked in maintenance, and she was a cook in the staff cafeteria—head cook, actually—and she had been doing the job for six years.

The workers who ate in the cafeteria had a very tough union. Once they had threatened a strike over the food.

"I decided that we were wasting too much food," Hazel said. "So I changed the menu—two main dishes and two sweets. The men moaned, 'We'll go out on strike'—all that lark. The shop steward came to me and insisted that the night workers get the same four main dishes and four sweets—two hot sweets and two cold—that the day workers got. So that's what we have now, four main dishes, because the union says so. And we're back to wasting food. If one of the choices runs out, they abuse me. They get a full breakfast, too. They're well looked after. It's an American company."

Did she like working for an American company?

"In some ways they're just like the English," she said. "The management give themselves big fancy cars as perks. They don't need the cars for their work. They travel to work in them, same as we do. It makes me mad."

She cooked for seventy men. Cooking for two people was easy. She didn't understand people who complained about it. But she wished she got outside more. She wanted to do more running, perhaps run a fast marathon—she could do four hours and ten minutes, but that wasn't good enough. Henry always wanted to play Scrabble, but they had terrible rows when they played.

"This is what I like," she said, as we rounded the bluff called North Cheek. "This is fun."

But the cliffs were falling into the sea, and in places there were big bites out of the path and a detour through a wheatfield or under a fence. On certain stretches, I thought: This path won't be here next year.

Hazel was silent for a while, and then she said, "I wonder what's going to happen."

What was she talking about?

She said, "I read somewhere that they're closing down whole towns in Canada."

At Robin Hood's Bay ("a quaint irregular fishing village on a steep slope") I bought Hazel a drink and then set off alone along the bushy cliffs and lumpy green headlands. At Ravenscar there were shrieking schoolchildren. One said, "They just shot that bloke!" I knew exactly who the dead man was. Sometimes it was not like a country at all, but rather a small parish.

23. Disused Railway Line

HIKING SOUTH on the teetering coastal path toward Scarborough, I took a wrong turn and stumbled onto a gravelly lane. It led in a wide straight way through the woods. It was so impressively useless a thoroughfare, I looked for it on my map. This sort of landscape feature was sometimes labeled Roman road (course of), and indicated by a broken line. But just as often it was identified as Disused Railway Line, and seemed just as ancient and just as derelict as a Roman road.

This thing had been part of the North-Eastern Railway, between Whitby and Scarborough. "The line skirts the coast, affording views of the sea to the right," the old guidebooks had said. But now there were only two alternatives: the footpath that was falling into the sea, and Route A-171, a dangerous speedway of dinky cars and whining motorbikes. And the railway had been turned into a bridle path—a degenerate step, since the railway had itself replaced the mounted traveler, the coach and four, and the horse bus.

The railway had not been profitable, only useful. And now, after a century's interruption of technology, horses had repossessed the route. I had seen this all over Britain—defunct viaducts, abandoned cuttings, former railway stations, ruined railway bridges—and I thought of all the lost hopes and all the wasted effort. Then, small dismantled England seemed simple and underdeveloped—and too mean to save herself—deceived by her own frugality.

I continued down the Disused Railway Line, marveling at the stupidity of it. They started by closing stations; then they cut the number of trains; then, with few trains and a reduced service, they could prove the line was losing money and not worth keeping; and then the line was closed for good and the tracks sold as scrap iron. And then it belonged to Ramblers and hackers; it was where people took their dogs to shit.

It was like a ghastly parody of hard times. In what had been the greatest railway country in the world, and the easiest and cheapest to traverse, the traveler was now told with perfect seriousness, "You can't get there from here."

This was a wonderful thing for my circular tour, because parts of Britain that had been frequented by travelers for hundreds of years had now become inaccessible, and what had been villages well served by railway lines had become curiously anorexic-looking and tumble-down, somehow deserving the epitaph from "Ozymandias." I had thought traveling around Britain would be a breeze; without a car it was often very difficult, but it revealed to me long coastal stretches of unexpected decrepitude.

It sometimes looked the reverse, yet it was decrepitude all the same. One such sight—one of the saddest and most irritating for me in Britain—was the railway station that had been auctioned off and sold to an up-and-comer who had turned it into a bijou bungalow. I found these maddening: the superbly solid Victorian railway architecture now the merest forcing house for geraniums and cats—Nigel and Jenny Bankler ("We're planning to start a baby") presently hogging the whole premises that used to be the station building at Applecross. "That was the waiting room, where Jenny has the breakfast nook, and do you see that funny little window thing, where there's that magnificent jar of muesli? Well, years ago, that was the—" Nigel wanted to call it Couplings, because the weekends they used it (their proper house was a semi in Cheadle), Jenny was practically insatiable. In the end they settled for the Sidings. Most of the other stations had become second homes. Foot-plate Cottage and Level Crossing and Dunrailing were right up the line, and one still had its original ticket window and grille (the Nordleys had trained some variegated ivy up it—looked smashing). "We got this place for practically nothing," they always said. "Mind you, we've put a fair bit of money into it," and then—with a jowly little grin—"We've always liked trains. Haven't we, Petal?"

I could not see one of these railway station bungalows and the owner-occupiers without thinking of Planet of the Apes. And now that the railway strike had started, I could foresee a time when every railway line would be turned into a cinder track for dog-owners and horse-lovers, and all the stations into bungalows. Thousands of miles of railway had already gone that way—why not the rest of it? Many of these lines had been closed by the Beeching Report of 1963. While I was traveling around the coast in the spring and summer of 1982, a new report on British Railways was being written. This was the Serpell Report, offering several options. Option A, greatly favored by the powerful road lobby, slashed the railway network from eleven thousand to sixteen hundred miles, leaving a skeleton service on the rails, and created a traffic jam on the roads that extended from John O'Groats to Land's End.

This trackless railway line took me into Scarborough.

***

Scarborough was the most complete seaside resort I had seen so far in Britain. It was a big full-blooded place, three hundred feet up on a part of the coast that was a geological freak. A buckling during the Jurassic period had given Scarborough a Front like a human face—two bays like eye sockets and the bluff between like a great nose of oolite. (It was a fact that people tended to settle those parts of the coast that had huge and recognizably human features—and the settlers even gave those features anatomical names.) Scarborough had theaters and concert halls and department stores; its ledges and steeps were lined with boardinghouses. The town had the same ample contours as its landladies, and the same sense of life in which even platitudes were delivered with gusto. "The biggest fool to a workingman these days is hisself!" The butchers wore straw boaters and blood-stained smocks, and among their sausages and black puddings were braces of pigeons still wearing feathers. On a coast in which one place was turned into a holiday camp and another was declared bankrupt and a third was sliding into the sea, Scarborough seemed, if not eternal, at least busy, prosperous, and alive.

When a British coastal place was modernized, it seemed to strangle on its own novelty. Scarborough had sensibly remained unchanged, and even its entertainments were antique. It was praised for having good theater, notably Alan Ayckbourne's playhouse—Mr. Ayckbourne was a local resident. But live plays were nothing new in a seaside resort—they were as old a virtue as the music halls and the bandstand concerts, and the end-of-the-pier shows.

At the Floral Hall on the clifftop above North Bay I went to see An Evening of Viennese Operetta, put on by the Scarborough Light Opera Society. The English were such brave and unembarrassed amateurs! They loved graceful waltzers, the ladies in ball gowns, the men in tuxedos; perfumed tits, violins, and gliding feet.

"The year is 1850—and Vienna is the city of dreams," John Beagle said as the curtain rose, and the violins swelled under the baton of Gordon Truefitt.

It was "The Blue Danube"! Two pairs of dancers, Maureen Bosomworth and Albert Marston, and the Pobgees—Elizabeth and Malcolm—swept across the floor. Die Fledermaus was next, Eunice Cockburn singing "The Laughing Song." And there was more: Gypsy songs, polkas, more violins. "My Hero," "The Gold and Silver Waltz," "Girls Were Made to Love and Kiss" ("And who am I to interfere with this?") and Maureen Bosomworth changed her gown for every new number. They ran through Franz Lehar, and then we had Sigmund Romberg's "Golden Days" and selections from "The Dancing Years" by Ivor Novello. The hall was full. "You Are My Heart's Delight" brought forth grateful applause, and the selections from Bitter Sweet, especially "I'll See You Again" ("Whenever spring breaks through again") had people wiping tears away.

It was old hat and corny, but it was done with such attention and energy that it was effective. It was the essence of the place itself: Scarborough was a success because it had stayed old-fashioned.

No one swam at such places. "Let's look round the shops," people said. They milled around until four and then treated themselves to "a meat tea." Or they roamed the gardens at the Spa. They chased their children on the sand and encouraged each other to buy ice cream cones, which they called "cornets." They went to the matinées and saw in the flesh their favorite television stars—that fat comedian, that Cockney magician, that man who sang "There'll Always Be an England" so beautifully; the drag artist who did "Mother Goose."

But mostly the seaside resort was tor sitting in the sunshine, reading something really lurid in the gutter press. Today it was the shooting of the Mad Killer. He had been tracked to Malton, only twenty miles away; he was found crouching in a shed near the tennis club; he was heading for the Malton police station—it was going to be part of what the papers called his "murder spree." He was asked to surrender, and when he refused, he was shot as he lay-in the shed.

An elderly clay-pigeon champion had been watching the police close in. This was John Blades. "I just hoped he would go onto the tennis courts," Mr. Blades said. "I could have shot him between the eyes from two hundred yards, and that's just what I wanted to do." Chris Burr was putting milk bottles out when he heard shots. He said, "It was just like the Alamo out there Really frightening. When it was all over, one policeman said to me, 'He had a ton of lead inside him.'"

This I gathered from a Daily Mail handed to me by Phyllis Barmby, who shared a bench overlooking Clarence Gardens. She was glad the Mad Killer had been gunned down. If they had arrested him, he probably would have got a flipping suspended sentence. Ordinarily she didn't believe in capital punishment, but this lad was a nasty piece of work and deserved everything he got. She was not angry. You could tell she was pleased. The Mad Killer business, and its satisfying conclusion, was just the thing for a breezy day on the Front at Scarborough.

Though Yorkshire was always associated, with factories and mines, four fifths of it was open country, and the whole of its coast was countrified. I walked to Osgodby and then to Filey. On the way I passed through some woods and saw a man shouting at a small owl. This was Edgar Overend, a local naturalist. He explained that it was an owlet. "A foolish woman gave it to me to feed. I've been going mad trying to catch mice for it. If she'd left it alone, its mother would have looked after it. But no, she had to meddle! Now the little chap doesn't want to fly away."

The owlet sat on the ground, staring sadly at Edgar Overend.

"Of! you go," Mr. Overend said.

The owlet was uncomprehending. Then it twisted its head upward. A bird had just flown by.

"That's it— you fly," Mr. Overend said. "Shoo!"

The owlet didn't move.

Mr. Overend clapped his hands sharply.

The owlet jumped into the air and made for a treetop.

"At last!" Mr. Overend said. "He'll be all right."

At Filey I saw a holiday camp ahead and hurried to the road. I caught a bus and climbed to the top deck. It was like being in a boat riding the swells of a sea that was running high. I became seasick—nauseated, anyway—and descended to the lower deck. If there hadn't been a railway strike, I could have taken a train from Scarborough. At Bridlington, I took another bus to Flamborough Head, a headland and chalk stack so huge, I had seen it from twenty miles away as I had walked toward Scarborough. This, unfortunately, was one of the Yorkshire sights—a popular outing—so I did not stay, but instead took a bus south to Beverley, all the while cursing the buses.

It was another area of Disused Railway Lines. There was one from Hornsea to Hull, and another back to the coast from Hull to Withernsea. Farther south there had been a train from Louth to Saltfleetby and on to Sutton, Willoughby, and Skegness; and to Spalding and to King's Lynn. And now there were only straight paths in the woods and a dot-dot-dot on the map—sometimes not even that. And if you wanted to get to Catwick, Newbald, Swine, Warter, Sigglesthorne, Great Limber, Rise, Thorngumbald, or Burstwick, you tried to find a bus, but probably you walked.

Trains are different from country to country, but buses are pretty much the same the world over. This was why I stood in a long line of people at the bus shelter—no one knew when the bus was due—and waited for an hour or more on a windy road, and then saw it moving slowly down a road five hills away, and crowded in, and jounced for another hour to go fifteen miles, and I thought: Afghanistan. It was like traveling in a third world country, the sort of country that was always promising that as soon as it achieved a modest prosperity, it would build itself a railway. Buses were slow and sickening and unpredictable, and it was dreadful having to depend on them in Britain. Of course, there were long-distance coaches—but I was not going long distances; and there were city buses—but they were not much good to me. With the rain coming down and the railway strike in full swing, I needed a way of moving down the coast. But there was no reliable way. It took me almost an entire day to get from Bridlington to Hull, where I had a two-hour wait for the next bus out. I would have stayed, but Hull was not on the coast. It was all slow progress, and it got so that the very expression "Take a bus" began to sound as mocking to me as "Fly a kite."

In the end, the bus did not take me where I wanted to go. I was headed straight across the Humber to Barrow, but the bus went only as far as Barton. So I spent part of the afternoon walking to Barrow. Yet the prospect of finding the place excited me. I knew someone who lived here. Just that morning I had seen how near I was to it, and I thought: Why not pay the old boy a visit?

Ten years before, I had met Mr. Duffill on the Orient Express, going from Paris to Istanbul. His frailty and his shabby clothes had made him seem a little mysterious. He smelled of bread crusts. He carried paper parcels tied with string. He avoided questions. I took him to be an embezzler or someone in the midst of a strange fugue, bound for Turkey in a mouse-gray gabardine coat.

We had shared a compartment. One morning at Domodossola, on the Italian frontier, Mr. Duffill got off the train to buy some food—there was no dining car—and while he was still on the platform, the Orient Express began moving. Mr. Duffill went rigid, biting on his pipe. And then we were speeding to Milan without him. His name became a verb for me. To be duffilled was to be abandoned by one's own train. You got off at a sleepy place to buy some gum or a newspaper, and before you could get back on, the train pulled away, taking your suitcase, your clothes, your money, and your passport with it. The point was not merely that you were left behind, but that you were left behind in a strange country, figuratively naked.

I never saw Mr. Duffill again. I had left his suitcase and his paper bags at Venice with a note, and I had wondered whether he caught up with them and continued to Istanbul. Once, I had tried to call him, but he did not have a telephone. One of the few things he had told me was that he lived in Barrow-upon-Humber, in Lincolnshire—here.

It was a tiny place—a church, a narrow High Street, a manor house, and a few shops. It had an air of rural monotony that was like the drone of a bee as it bumbled slowly from flower to flower. No one ever came here; people just went away from it and never returned.

I walked down the street and saw a man.

"Excuse me, do you know a Mr. Duffill?"

He nodded. "The corner shop."

The corner shop had a small sign that said duffill's hardware. But it was locked. A square of cardboard in the window was lettered Gone on Holiday. I said out loud, "Goddamn it."

A lady was passing. This was Mrs. Marden. She saw that I was exasperated. She wondered if I needed directions. I said I was looking for Mr. Duffill.

"He won't be back for another week," she said.

"Where has he gone this time?" I asked. "Not Istanbul, I hope."

She said, "Are you looking for Richard Duffill?"

"Yes," I said.

Her hand went to her face, and I knew before she spoke that he was dead.

***

"His name was Richard Cuthbert Duffill. He was a most unusual man," said his sister-in-law, Mrs. Jack Duffill. She lived at Glynd-bourne, a bungalow just beyond the churchyard. She did not ask who I was. It seemed only natural to her that someone should be inquiring about the life of this strange man, who had died two years before, at the age of seventy-nine. He had been as old as the century—seventy-three the year he had stepped off the Orient Express at Domodossola. Mrs. Jack said, "Do you know about his adventurous life?"

I said, "I don't know anything about him." All I knew was his name and his village.

"He was born right here in Barrow, in the Hall cottages. The Hall was one of the grand houses. Richard's father was the gardener and his mother was a housemaid. Those were the days of servants The Hall was the manor—Mr. Uppleby was the Lord of the Manor—and of course the Duffills were servants, and rather poor..."

But Richard Duffill was brilliant. At the age of eleven he was encouraged by the headmaster of the village school to go to the Technical College in Hull. He excelled at math, but he was also a gifted linguist. He learned French, Latin, German, Russian, and Spanish while still a teen-ager at Hull. But he had become somewhat introspective, for when Richard was twelve his father died. Mr. Uppleby took an interest, but the young boy usually just stayed inside and read and did his lessons, or else he went for long solitary walks.

His main recreation was swimming, and his skill in this resulted in his becoming a local hero. One summer day in 1917 he was on a swimming expedition with some friends at a quarry called the Brick Pits, near the Humber Bank. One of the boys, a certain Howson, began to struggle. He shouted, and then he disappeared beneath the murky water. Duffill dived repeatedly after him and finally surfaced with Howson and dragged him to shore, saving the boy's life. A few days later, the Hull newspaper reported the story under the headline A PLUCKY BARROW BOY.

For this, Duffill, a Boy Scout, was awarded the Silver Cross for Bravery. It was the first time this honor had ever come to a Lincolnshire scout. Some months afterward, the Carnegie Heroes' Fund presented Duffill with a silver watch "for gallantry," and gave him a sum of money "to help him in his education and future career."

In 1919, still young, and fluent in half a dozen languages, he joined the Inter-Allied Plebescite Commission and was sent to Allenstein, in what was then East Prussia, to deal with the aftermath of World War One—sorting out prisoners and helping at the Special Court of Justice. In the following few years he did the same in Klag enfurt (Austria) and Oppeln (Opole, Upper Silesia—now Poland). Berlin was next. Duffill got a job with the celebrated firm of Price, Waterhouse, the international accountants. He stayed in Berlin for ten years, abruptly resigning in 1935 and leaving—fleeing, some people said—for England.

Politically, he was of the left. His friends in Berlin thought he might be gathering information for the British secret service. ("One felt he would have made the ideal agent," an old friend of Duffill's told me.) In any case, he left Germany so suddenly, it was assumed that he was being pursued by Nazi agents or wolves from the Sturm Abteilung. He made it safely home, and he was also able to get all his money out of Germany ("an exceedingly clever and daring feat," another friend told me. "His fortune was considerable").

He may have had a nervous breakdown then; there was some speculation. He sank for a year, re-emerging in 1936 as a chief accountant for an American movie company. Two years later, a letter of reference said that Duffill was "thoroughly acquainted with various sides of the film trade." In 1939 there was another gap, lasting until 1945: the war certainly—but where was Duffill? No one could tell me. His brother said, "Richard never discussed his working life or his world-traveling with us."

In the late forties, he apparently rejoined Price, Waterhouse and traveled throughout Europe. He went to Egypt and Turkey; he returned to Germany; he went to Sweden and Russia, "for whose leaders he had the greatest admiration."

After his retirement he continued to travel. He had never married. He was always alone. But the snapshots he kept showed him to be a very stylish dresser—waistcoat, plus fours, cashmere overcoat, homburg, stickpin. A characteristic of natty dressers is that they wear too many clothes. Duffill's snapshots showed this; and he always wore a hat.

He wore a ruglike wig, I was told. "It stuck out in the back." He had had brain surgery. "He once played tennis in Cairo." He had gone on socialist holidays to eastern Europe. He hated Hitler. He was very "spiritual," one of his old friends said. He became interested in the philosophy of George Ivanovich Gurdjieff and was a close friend of the great Gurdjieff scholar John Godolphin Bennett. "And after a while Richard got frightfully steamed up about dervishes," Bennett's widow told me. That was why Duffill was on his way to Istanbul, she said—to renew his acquaintance with some whirling dervishes!

But what I wanted to know was what had happened to him after the Orient Express pulled out of Domodossola.

Mrs. Jack said, "He got out at a station. He didn't tell me where. He had left his luggage on the train. Then the train pulled out. He inquired when the next train was, and they told him the time—five o'clock. Only a few hours, he thought. But he had got mixed up. He thought they meant P.M. and they actually meant A.M.—five the next morning. He had a very bad night, and the next day he went to—where was it? Venice? Yes, he collected his luggage"—the paper bags I had left with the controllore —"and eventually got to Istanbul."

So he had made it!

I told Mrs. Jack who I was and how I had met Mr. Duffill.

She said, "Oh, yes, I read your book! My neighbor's son is an avid reader. He told us about it. He said, 'I think you should see this—I think this is our Mr. Duffill.' And then everyone in Barrow read it."

I was eager to know whether Mr. Duffill himself had read it.

"I wanted him to see it," Mrs. Jack said. "I put a copy aside. But when he came over, he wasn't too good. He didn't see it. The next time he came over I forgot about the book. That was the last time, really. He had his stroke and just deteriorated. And he died. So he never saw it—"

Thank God for that, I thought.

What an interesting man that stranger had been! He had seemed frail, elderly, a little crazy and suspicious on the Orient Express. Typical, I had thought. But now I knew how unusual he had been—brave, kind, secretive, resourceful, solitary, brilliant. He had slept and snored in the upper berth of my compartment. I had not known him at all, but the more I found out about him, the more I missed him. It would have been a privilege to know him personally, and yet even in friendship he would never have confirmed what I strongly suspected—that he had almost certainly been a spy.

24. The North Norfolk Railway

AT GRIMSBY I bought a London paper with the headline RAIL-STRICKEN BRITAIN ROLLS ON! But nothing was rolling in Grimsby, not even a train for the three miles to Cleethorpes. Nothing had been rolling in Scarborough, where I had walked, or Hull, where I had wasted a day on a bus that had taken Mexican-style detours. (It was literally true that English country buses sometimes went backward.) Nothing was rolling at all: I never saw a train in motion during the long railway strike. The government kept claiming that a number of trains were operating and that the strike (the issue was drivers' work schedules) was halfhearted. London news always seemed shrill and untruthful upcountry, but this situation-normal news was a damned lie in Grimsby and a cruel joke in poor starved Cleethorpes.

On the bus to Cleethorpes, the man in the next seat, Jim Popplewell, explained that he was a carpet-layer. "But when times are bad, people stop buying carpets," he said. He was earning 50 percent less than he had two years ago.

"What do you think of the north?" he asked. He meant here.

"I don't think of this as the north," I said. After all, I had been to Cape Wrath, four hundred miles north of this.

"But this is the north," Mr. Popplewell said. "It's not half bad. Have a look at the Wolds."

"What exactly are the Wolds?"

"Woods," he said. "Some hills. You'll see them as you head towards Lincoln."

I said I would be sticking to the coast.

"Mablethorpe," he said. "Skeggy."

"That kind of thing," I said.

"I see. You just go from pillar to post."

He said it in a kindly way. I was sure he meant "from place to place." But his statement was nonetheless accurate.

Was Cleethorpes a pillar or a post? It looked a terrible place. I wanted to go away. But how? The only way I could have left was on foot, in the rain, sinking in the mud of the Humber Bank. So I stayed the night in Cleethorpes and watched filthy children playing Tiggy. It was a version of tag. Home was called the Hob. "If we tig the 'ob before 'e gets to the 'ob, we say 'on the 'ob.'" They were twelve-year-olds and a little wary of me. "It's okay," one called to the others, "'e's not a copper!" I must have seemed a little strange to them—all my questions. But I was lonely, I was killing time, I wanted to leave Cleethorpes—to go anywhere. I mentioned Mablethorpe. The salesmen in the hotel laughed at this. Mablethorpe was anywhere.

The salesmen were that dying breed of hustlers that I had first seen on the Kent coast at Littlestone-on-Sea. They talked about places being "shocking." They talked about their territory, calling it "my parish." These gents stopping the night at the Dolphin in Cleethorpes sold everything—brushes, plastic basins, outsized garments, double-glazing. One man told me he went a thousand miles a week in his car and made a hundred and eighty calls. He drove all over Lincolnshire and Yorkshire—automobile spares. A camera salesman told me that the profit on a hundred-quid camera was a fiver for a retailer—hardly worth the effort, since he could make the same profit selling four rolls of film. This man, Jessel by name, said, "We'll all be out of a job in a year or two. My job could be done by a computer. It wouldn't be the same—no human element, see—but it would be cheaper for my company."

The next day I walked back to Grimsby. I asked the way and a lady said, "You must be going to the docks."

Did I look like an able seaman? My coastal traveling had obviously taken its toll on my appearance. I was both flattered and appalled. Here I was, months after leaving Margate, still wearing my leather jacket and my oily shoes and my knapsack, and I suppose I was a little pigeon-toed from walking in a clockwise direction.

There had been stock-car racing and wrestling and bingo at Cleethorpes, but just next door in Grimsby there was the Caxton Theatre and the fish docks and a. sense that this had once been a bustling place and had only recently collapsed. The buildings and high-rise parking lots still stood, but they were empty. A sign at a Grimsby shop selling leathers and furs said, Coneys. I had never seen this old word for rabbit in an advertisement before—and it was also a famous word for "suckers."

The railway station was still shut. Only one bus today was going down the coast—the Ron Appleby coach to Mablethorpe. Well, that was my general direction. There were only five of us on board. I sat down and read the London papers again—more gloating, and what had already begun to be called "the Falklands' spirit." Had these past months produced a national shift of mood? "The travelling public are coping magnificently with the strike ... Many people have found they can do quite well without British Rail," the Tory papers said. More lies. But the truth was pitiable: five dinks bumping down to Mablethorpe. My guess was that most people were coping with the strike by not traveling at all. That was the British way: inaction was a form of coping.

"Not a bad place is Grimsby," an old man in the bus said to me. His name was Sam Dunball and he had worked at the fish docks. He was retired now, and a good thing, too, he said. "The fish is gone and the docks is half-empty. Tt was the Cod War that finished Grimsby. We haven't been the same since. No, there's no fishing industry here anymore."

The so-called Cod War had been a legal dispute over Britain's traditional fishing grounds off the coast of Iceland. A two-hundred-mile fishing limit was declared by Iceland. There was a wrangle, which Britain lost. And the fishing industry in Britain was broken.

Mr. Dunball wanted to know what I thought of London.

I told him that I thought London was more like a country than a city. It was a sort of independent republic.

"I was in London once!" Mr. Dunball said. "It was before the war. Simpson's Hotel in the Caledonian Road, four-and-sixpence bed and breakfast. The doorknob, see, was in the middle of the door, and you pushed it and walked downstairs to the parlor. I was down there attending a course at Houndsditch Technical College. But it didn't do me a bit of good. I always wanted to go down for a Cup Final, but I never did. I just went that one time. I'll never forget it."

We skirted the Wolds—they looked like low rolls of fog in the distance—and then we traveled through the spinach fields of Lincolnshire. It was an area of great flatness, land like sea, and a wide sky of white vacant light. There was something about this even landscape and the four-square farmhouses and the geometry of the fields that hinted at moral probity and Bible-reading and rectitude. It was clear in the angles of the hedges and all the way to the straight, ruled horizon. The highest object in the landscape was the church spire, and this solitary pencil point was a kind of sanctifying emphasis that could be seen ten miles away. But it was all illusion, like the apparent disorder that made jungles seem savage to missionaries. And yet it was true that people who lived in sight of a flat horizon tended to build square houses.

At North Somercotes we passed Locksley Hall. I should have known it from the way it overlooked the sandy tracts and the long hollow ocean ridges.

O the dreary, dreary moorland! O the barren shore!

But was it really better, as the poem said, to have "fifty years of Europe than a cycle of Cathay"? It did not seem so in Mablethorpe, a flat, sad place modeled on a holiday camp and thronged with shivering vacationers. It was cold, but that was not the reason these people were scowling. This was the coast of last resorts. In other years these people had had their fish and chips in Spain, but there was less work now, and all their dole money got them this year was this place and Mumby and Hogsthorpe and Sutton-on-Sea. It was a dole holiday, a cheapie, and no more fun than a day out from the prison farm, some enforced fresh air, and then back to the classified ads and the Job Centre.

The caravan sites with their acres of tin boxes—whole caravan towns, in fact, tucked behind the duney shore—rivaled those I had seen on the coast of Wales. This was also a sort of miners' Riviera, for as we neared Skegness we passed holiday camp hotels. They had the look of painted prisons: the Nottinghamshire Miners' Holiday Home and the Derbyshire Miners' Holiday Centre and the huge wind-whipped Eastgate Holiday Centre at Ingoldmells. Fourteen applicants had expressed an eagerness to enter Eastgate's Miss Topless Competition—a tit show for amateurs—but the odd thing was that there were not enough vacationers to watch it, so the date had been pushed ahead to late August.

And then Skeggy itself—it deserved its ragged-sounding nickname. It was a low, loud, faded seaside resort. It was utterly joyless. Its vulgarity was uninteresting. It was painfully ugly. It made the English seem dangerous. And, at last, it made me want to leave—to take long strides down its broad sands and walk all the way to Friskney Flats. But there was no walking here—too muddy, too many of the canals and ditches they called "drains" here, and no path. There was no train, so I took a bus, or rather several of them, along the silty shore of the Wash, getting off at Butterwick and walking to Boston.

Boston's church—the Stump, they called it—was so tall and the land around it so flat that I was able to see it for a whole afternoon as I rode and walked toward it. From a distance it looked like a water tower, and closer like a gray stone lantern, and in Boston itself it resembled a stone crown on a pillar. This corner of the Wash was all a landscape of ancient churches separated by flat fields. I could not see the shore until I was on top of it, and it was impossible to walk there without getting wet feet. It was like the Netherlands—that white Dutch daylight and hard-packed sand and measured fields and plain old houses set in Calvinist clumps, with miles of vegetables between. The landscape was austere, but the place names were fantastic: Fishtoft, Breast Sand, Whaplode, Pode Hole, and Quadring Eudike; and a very ordinary street would have a name like Belchmire Lane. But it was so flat, you could see a mature poplar tree ten miles away.

***

After more than a week of the railway strike, the management of British Rail said that they were breaking it. They said the drivers were showing up. They said the railways were being manned in a modest way. They said that all over the country people were traveling to work on trains—10 percent of the trains were running.

London news had always sounded a little strange when I heard it in places like Enniskillen, Mallaig, Porlock, or Grimsby. Now in King's Lynn it was perplexing to read of these running trains. There was none running in King's Lynn. The station was empty. It was another lie, like "Rail-stricken Britain rolls on." No one I saw was going anywhere.

King's Lynn was dignified and dull, its stately center so finely preserved, it looked embalmed; and grafted to it was a shopping precinct. This rabbit warren was all discount stores and boutiques and hamburger joints; it would not have seemed out of place in Hyannis, Massachusetts, though it was a little too vulgar for Osterville. King's Lynn's Skinheads and motorcyclists were particularly boisterous—these gangs seemed to me as much a part of the fine old market towns in provincial England as the period houses and the graceful windows, and they seemed especially to enjoy roaring down quaint cobblestone streets on their Japanese motorbikes. They called the bikes "hogs" in their gentle rustic accents.

But King's Lynn was a habitable place and patchily pretty, and it had hopes. The King's Lynn Festival would be starting soon. The brochures promised eight concerts, five orchestras, a jazz band, several plays, poetry readings, numerous movies, and puppet shows. And although it was some miles from the coast—if the Wash could be called the coast—it had the air of a seaport, and the same Dutchness I had sensed in Lincolnshire.

Five railway lines had met at King's Lynn, where there was now one—and it was strike-bound. It was marshy along the shore to Hunstanton. So I took the bus to the top of the Norfolk coast, Wells-next-the-Sea. It was such a tame landscape of meadows and thin woods that it looked like Wimbledon Common for forty miles. Wells and its neighbor, Stiffkey, were famous for their cockles. I walked at the edge of the salt marsh and had some cockles for lunch. They were salty and had the texture of lumps of underdone pasta. Stiffkey had once had a rector at its church who had scandalized—"thrilled" was probably a more apt word—English society by trying to reform prostitutes. I stopped at a public house in Stiffkey to ask about this notorious clergyman, but before I could introduce the subject, the barman (Fred Watmough) began talking about trains. He said there was one at Weybourne that ran to Sheringham, and it was running.

"What about the strike?"

Mr. Watmough said, "This is a private line. They call it 'the Poppy Line.' Very pretty."

I walked to Weybourne, almost ten miles. But Weybourne was no more than a hamlet—flinty cottages, a square-towered church, and a lovely windmill. A small sign said north Norfolk railway and pointed up a country lane. That was another mile, between pines and pastures, and then Weybourne Station.

"The last train—the last proper train—left here in 1964, traveling from Melton Constable to Great Yarmouth," Mr. Winch said. Mr. Winch was a volunteer on the North Norfolk Railway. "And now Melton Constable is just a little village in the middle of nowhere."

"And if you said you wanted to take the train to Great Yarmouth, people would probably laugh," I said.

"In actual fact," Mr. Winch said, "you can't get there from here."

We sat on the platform, watching the poppies tossing in the wind.

Mr. Winch said, "All they'll have left in a few years will be the big intercity routes. King's Lynn won't be on the map. Neither will Cromer or Great Yarmouth or Lowestoft."

"How will people get around?"

He said, "By car. And if they don't drive, they'll live in cities."

"Everyone can't live in the cities," I said.

"Correct," he said. "How's that for a game of soldiers?"

Then he stood up.

"They'll be diddling. Fiddle-faddling," he said. "But they won't get anywhere."

I said, "Buses aren't the answer."

Mr. Winch was looking at the oncoming train. He said, "Buses aren't even a good question. You go to a bus station and ask how to get to Swaffam. And they say, 'Go to Fakenham. You'll probably get a connection there.' They don't even have timetables."

I wanted to say Yes, it's like South America, but I decided not to. And yet Mr. Winch would probably have agreed with me. In a self-critical mood the English could be brutal.

And so I boarded the train. The North Norfolk Railway was a preserved line. It went three miles, to Sheringham, at a donkey trot. People snapped pictures of the engine and smiled admiringly at it. It was the railway buffs who were helping to dismantle British Railways. Their nostalgia was dangerous, since they hankered for the past and were never happier than when they were able to turn an old train into a toy. The commuter who spent two hours a day on the suburban train going to and from his place of work was very seldom a railway buff.

Rosalie and Hugh Mutton collected preserved railways. They had been on the Romney, Hythe, and Dymchurch; the Ravenglass; all the Welsh lines; and more. They loved steam. They would drive hundreds of miles in their Ford Escort to take a steam train. They were members of a steam railway preservation society. They lived in Luton. This one reminded them of the line in Shepton Mallet.

Then Mrs. Mutton said, "Where's your casual top?"

"I don't have a casual top in brown, do I," Mr. Mutton said.

"Why are you wearing brown?"

Mr. Mutton said, "I can't wear blue all the time, can I."

Rhoda Gauntlett was at the window. She said, "That sea looks so lovely. And that grass. It's a golf course."

We looked at the golf course—Sheringham, so soon.

"I'd get confused going round a golf course," Mrs. Mutton said. "You walk bloody miles. How do you know which way to go?"

This was the only train in Britain today, the fifteen-minute ride from Weybourne. It was sunny in Sheringham—a thousand people on the sandy beach, but only two people in the water.

There were three old ladies walking along the Promenade. They had strong country accents, probably Norfolk. I could never place these burrs and haws.

"I should have worn my blooming hat."

"The air's fresh, but it's making my eyes water."

"We can look round Woolworth's after we've had our tea."

It was a day at the seaside, and then back to their cottages in Great Snoring. They were not like the others, who had come to sit behind canvas windbreaks ("eighty pence per day or any portion thereof') and read FOUR KILLED BY RUNAWAY LORRY or WIFE KILLER GIVEN THREE YEARS (she had taunted him about money; he did not earn much; he bashed her brains out with a hammer; "You've: suffered enough," the judge said) or BLUNDESTON CHILD BATTERED (bruised tot with broken leg; "He fell off a chair," the mother said; one year, pending psychiatric report). They crouched on the groynes, smoking cigarettes. They lay in the bright sunshine wearing raincoats. They stood in their bathing suits. Their skin was the veiny white of raw sausage casings.

The tide was out, so I walked to Cromer along the sand. The crumbly yellow-dirt cliffs were like the banks of a quarry, high and scooped out and raked vertically by erosion. Halfway between Sheringham and Cromer there were no people, because, characteristically, the English never strayed far from their cars, and even the most crowded parts of the English coast were empty between the parking lots. Only one man was here, Collie Wylie, a rock collector. He was hacking amber-colored tubes out of the chalk slabs on the shore. Belamites, he called them. "Take that one," he said. "Now that one is between five and eight million years old."

I saw a pillbox down the beach. It had once been on top of the cliff, and inside it the men from "Dads' Army" had conned for Germans. "Jerry would love to catch us on the hop." But the soft cliffs were constantly falling, and the pillbox had slipped a hundred feet and was now sinking into the sand, a cute little artifact from the war, buried to its gunholes.

I came to Cromer. An old man in a greasy coat sat on a wooden groyne on the beach, reading a comic book about war in outer space.

***

Seaside Special '82 was playing at the Pavilion Theatre, at the end of the pier at Cromer. It was the summer show, July to September, every day except Sunday, and two matinées. I had not gone to any of these end-of-the-pier shows. I was nearing the end of my circular tour, so I decided to stay in Cromer and see the show. I found a hotel. Cromer was very empty. It had a sort of atrophied charm, a high round-shouldered Edwardian look, red brick terraces and red brick hotels and the loudest seagulls in Norfolk.

There were not more than thirty people in the audience that night at the Pavilion Theatre, which was pathetic, because there were nine people in the show. But seeing the show was like observing England's secret life—its anxiety in the dismal jokes, its sadness in the old songs.

"Hands up, all those who aren't working," one comedian said.

A number of hands went up—eight or ten—but this was a terrible admission, and down they went before I could count them properly.

The comedian was already laughing. "Have some Beecham Pills," he said. "They'll get you 'working' again!"

There were more jokes, awful ones like this, and then a lady singer came out and in a sweet voice sang "The Russian Nightingale." She encouraged the audience to join in the chorus of the next one, and they offered timid voices, singing,

"Let him go, let him tarry,

Let him sink, or let him swim.

He doesn't care for me

And I don't care for him."

The comedians returned. They had changed their costumes. They had worn floppy hats the first time; now they wore bowler hats and squirting flowers.

"We used to put manure on our rhubarb."

"We used to put custard on ours!"

No one laughed.

"Got any matches?"

"Yes, and they're good British ones."

"How do you know?"

"Because they're all strikers!"

A child in the first row began to cry.

The dancers came on. They were pretty girls and they danced well. They were billed as "Our Disco Dollies" on the poster. More singers appeared and "A Tribute to Al Jolson" was announced: nine minstrel show numbers, done in blackface. Entertainers in the United States could be run out of town for this sort of thing; in Cromer the audience applauded. Al Jolson was a fond memory and his rendition of "Mammy" was a special favorite in musical revues. No one had ever tired of minstrel shows in England, and they persisted on British television well into the 1970s.

It had been less than a month since the end of the Falklands War, but in the second half of Seaside Special there was a comedy routine in which an Argentine general appeared—goofy dago in ill-fitting khaki uniform—"How dare you insult me!"

I could hear the surf sloshing against the iron struts of the pier.

"And you come and pour yourself on me," a man was singing. It was a love song. The audience seemed embarrassed by it. They preferred "California Here I Come" and "When I Grow Too Old to Dream," sung by a man named Derick, from Johannesburg. The program said that he had "appeared in every top night spot in South Africa and Rhodesia." Say "top night spot in Zimbabwe" and it does not sound the same—it brings to mind drums and thick foliage.

One of the comedians reappeared. I had come to dread this man. I had reason. Now he played "The Warsaw Concerto" and cracked jokes as he played. "It's going to be eighty tomorrow," he said. "Forty in the morning and forty in the afternoon!"

His jokes were flat, but the music was pleasant and the singers had excellent voices. In fact, most of the performers were talented, and they pretended to be playing to a full house—not the thirty of us who sat so silently in the echoing theater. The show people conveyed the impression that they were enjoying themselves. But it can't have been much fun, looking at those empty seats. Cromer itself was very dull. And I imagined these performers were miserably paid. I wanted to know more about them. I played with the idea of sending a message backstage to one of the chorus girls. I'd get her name out of the program. Millie Plackett, the one whose thighs jiggled. "Millie, it's for you! Maybe it's your big break!" Meet me after the show at the Hotel de Paris ... That was actually the name of my hotel, an enjoyable pile of brick and plaster splendor. But I didn't look the part. In my scratched leather jacket and torn dungarees and oily hiking shoes, I thought Millie Plackett might misunderstand my intentions.

I stayed until the end of the show, finally admitting that I was enjoying myself. One act was of a kind I found irresistible—the magician whose tricks go wrong, leaving him with broken eggs in his hat and the wrong deck of cards. There was always an elaborate buildup and then a sudden collapse. "Presto," he said as the trick failed. And then the last trick, the one that looked dangerous, worked like a charm and was completely baffling.

They saved the saddest song for the end. It was a love song, but in the circumstances it sounded nationalistic. It was sentimental hope, Ivor Novello gush, at the end of the pier that was trembling on the tide. I had heard it elsewhere on the coast. It was anything but new, but it was the most popular number on the seaside that year:

We'll gather lilacs in the spring agine,

And walk together down a shady line...

25. Striking Southend

ON MY LAST LONG TRUDGE, curving down the rump of England on the Norfolk coast and into Suffolk, I thought: Every British bulge is different and every mile has its own mood. I said Blackpool, and people said, "Naturally!" I said Worthing, and they said, "Of all places!" The character was fixed, and though few coastal places matched their reputation, each was unique. It made my circular tour a pleasure, because it was always worth setting off in the morning. It might be bad ahead, but at least it was different; and the dreariest and most defoliated harbor town might be five minutes from a green sweep of bay.

This was the reason "typical" was regarded as such an unfair word in England. And yet there was such a thing as typical on the coast—but to an alien, something typical could seem just as fascinating as the mosques of the Golden Horn.

There was always an Esplanade, and always a Bandstand on it; always a War Memorial and a Rose Garden and a bench bearing a small stained plaque that said, To the Memory of Arthur Wetherup. There was always a Lifeboat Station and a Lighthouse and a Pier; a Putting Green, a Bowling Green, a Cricket Pitch, a Boating Lake, and a church the guidebook said was Perpendicular. The news agent sold two Greetings From picture postcards, one with kittens and the other with two plump girls in surf, and he had a selection of cartoon postcards with mildly filthy captions; the souvenir stall sold rock candy; and the local real estate agent advertised a dismal cottage as "chalet-bungalow, bags of character, on bus route, superb sea views, suit retired couple." There was always a fun fair and it was never fun, and the video machines were always busier than the pinball machines or the one-armed bandits. There was always an Indian restaurant and it was always called the Taj Mahal and the owners were always from Bangladesh. Of the three fish-and-chip shops, two were owned by Greeks and the third was always closed. The Chinese restaurant, Hong Kong Gardens, was always empty; Food to Take A way, its sign said. There were four pubs, one was the Red Lion, and the largest one was owned by a bad-tempered Londoner—"He's a real Cockney," people said; he had been in the army.

TO TOWN CENTRE, said a sign on Marine Parade, where there was a tub of geraniums, GOLF LINKS, said another, and a third, PUBLIC CONVENIENCES. A man stood just inside the door of gents and tried to catch your eye as you entered, but he never said a word. The man with the mop stood at the door of ladies. Outside town was a housing estate called Happy Valley. Yanks had camped there in the war. Beyond it was a caravan park called Golden Sands. The best hotel was the Grand, the poorest the Marine, and there was a guest house called Bellavista. The best place to stay was at a bed and breakfast called the Blodgetts. Charles Dickens had spent a night in the Grand; Wordsworth had hiked in the nearby hills; Tennyson had spent a summer in a huge house near the sandy stretch that was called the Strand; and an obscure politician had died at the Rookery. A famous murderer (he had slowly poisoned his wife) had been arrested on the Front, where he had been strolling with his young mistress.

The muddy part of the shore was called the Flats, the marshy part the Levels, the stony part the Shingles, the pebbly part the Reach, and something a mile away was always called the Crumbles. The Manor, once very grand, was now a children's home. Every Easter two gangs from London fought on Marine Parade. The town had a long history of smuggling, a bay called Smugglers' Cove, and a pub called the Smugglers' Inn.

Of the four headlands nearby, the first was part of a private golf course; the second was owned by the National Trust and had a muddy path and wooden steps on the steep bits; the third—the really magnificent one—was owned by the Ministry of Defence and used as a firing range and labeled DANGER AREA on the Ordnance Survey Maps; the fourth headland was all rocks and called the Cobbler and His Dwarfs.

The Pier had been condemned. It was threatened with demolition. A society had been formed to save it, but it would be blown up next year just the same. There was now a parking lot where the Romans had landed. The discothèque was called Spangles. The Museum was shut that day, the Swimming Pool was closed for repairs, the Baptist church was open, there were nine motor coaches parked in front of the broken boulders and ruined walls called the Castle. At the café near the entrance to the Castle a fourteen-year-old girl served tea in cracked mugs, and cellophane-wrapped cookies, stale fruitcake, and cold pork pies. She said, "We don't do sandwiches" and "We're all out of spoons," and when you asked for potato chips she said, "What flavor crisps?" and listed five, including prawn, Bovril, cheese and onion, and bacon. There was a film of sticky marmalade on the tables at the café, and you left with a patch of it on your elbow.

The railway had been closed down in 1964, and the fishing industry had folded five years ago. The art deco cinema was now a bingo hall, and what had been a ship's chandler was the Cinema Club, where Swedish pornographic films were shown all day ("Members Only"). There was an American radar station—or was it a missile base? No one knew—it was a few miles away; but the Americans had kept a low profile ever since one American soldier had raped a local lass in his car at the Reach (she had been hitchhiking in her bathing suit after dark that summer night). A nuclear power station quaintly named Thorncliffe was planned for the near future a mile south of the Cobbler. Bill Haley and the Comets had once sung at the Lido. The new shopping precinct was a failure. The dog was a Jack Russell terrier named Andy. The new bus shelter had been vandalized. It was famous for its whelks. It was raining.

***

So I was prepared for certain things that lay between Cromer and Clacton-on-Sea; I could ignore what was typical and familiar, and I could concentrate on what was new. I moved on, toward Great Yarmouth and Lowestoft, sometimes walking and sometimes taking a local bus. The buses were the same width as the country lanes—and so I had to dive into the hawthorn hedges when they passed me. There were poppies in the peaceful fields. At Scratby there were shallys, and at the village of California a caravan park.

The villages in East Anglia were all sorts—small stingy-rich places, ruined settlements, tiny hamlets with long memories, collapsing churches surrounded by desolation, shally cities, and coastal horrors on rotting docks. Caister-on-Sea had been a Roman camp, and now it was a caravan park, just squat dingy houses, and pup tents, and "caravanettes," and a man in his underwear, lying on a small rug of grass by the roadside and sunning his spotty back as the traffic roared past. So much for the romance of Caesar's Caister. Place names were always misleading. Freshfields was always the semislum, and Messing, Turdley, and Swines always the pretty villages.

"Great Yarmouth, with its mile of Cockneyfied sea-front and its overflow of nigger minstrelsy, now strikes the wrong note so continuously that I, for my part, became conscious on the spot, of a chill to the spirit of research." Thus Henry James, fluttering his hands and perspiring and easing his big bum into the next train south. He had hoped to sit on the Front and sink into a reverie of David Copperfield and the Peggottys. But it was often a mistake in England to revisit fictional landscapes. Local people blamed the German bombing for Great Yarmouth's gappy, still-damaged look, but James's dismay was proof that the town had been just as raucous and profane a hundred years ago. Yet that was in itself interesting; aliens usually missed the point about England by investing its landscape with the passions of its great literature, and it had so seldom been seen plainly, without literary footnotes. Like England, Great Yarmouth's chief attraction was that it was no longer a place of reverential pilgrimage. It had long ago stopped being Dickensian.

There was a circus in town; there was all-in wrestling—Giant Haystacks was fighting a grudge match against Big Daddy. Space in My Pajamas was playing at a theater on the Front: "Miss Fiona Richmond, Live on Stage! A Non-Stop Nude Laughter Romp—the Ultimate Sexual Fantasy!" There were now two miles of sea-front—roller coasters, amusement arcades, shooting galleries. The town had swollen and burst long ago, but it had the English seaside characteristic of being self-destructive in its own way. The shows were popular and well attended, perhaps because they lacked the decent vulgarity of those at Cromer.

"That wally on the poster. I heard him on the flipping wireless."

The accents of Great Yarmouth's visitors were the accents of London—a certain class, sticking to old-fashioned expressions and stubborn intonations.

"Let's nip over one of them caffys."

And the two boys kicked at the traffic and hurried under the sign Frying for Dinner-Tea-Supper.

The coast between here and Lowestoft was poor for walking: it was populous and bungalow-ridden, and the only place to walk was on the main road. I hiked to Gorleston, a mile or so, and gave up. A new hospital had been built at Gorleston. It was flimsily made and very ugly; it also looked temporary and unsafe. The national poverty was now evident in public buildings, some of them almost unbelievable eyesores. She just let herself go, people said of the woman who got fat and stopped combing her hair. Sometimes Britain seemed that way to me. And it was too bad a hospital looked so inadequate, because Britain had the best public health service in the world and certainly the fairest doctors.

At Lowestoft I began to understand East Anglia's modest prosperity. Lowestoft had large produce markets and on its seafront a frozen food plant as vast as a power station. East Anglia was intensively farmed, and all those vegetables I had seen ended up here in ice bricks. After the failure of its automobile industry and its steel mills and its electronics factories, one of Britain's most notable postwar successes was growing Birds Eye spinach.

The railway station at Lowestoft was open, but when I asked a group of men gathered there whether there were any trains, they laughed.

"Come back September first," Mr. Fricker said.

They were all railwaymen. They were not picketing; they had just come to the station out of habit. They had nothing else to do.

"No trains at all," Mr. Beamish said. "This station is one hundred percent."

Mr. Holmesome, a driver, said, "Want to know the truth? The drivers here don't want to come out on strike. We're just doing it out of loyalty to the union. This isn't a busy station. It's only average. If the strike goes on, this will be one of the first stations to be axed, and then we'll lose our jobs, and we'll be in the shit with everyone else."

It was one hour and twenty minutes from Lowestoft to Ipswich. By bus it was almost three hours—it took all morning. It was a little over forty miles.

But I was headed down the coast for Southwold. I went to the bus station: Was there a bus? "Left an hour ago, squire"—"squire" because the news was bad, a further turn of the screw; sarcasm, not politeness. There was not another bus to Southwold today.

"I have to get to Southwold," I said.

"I'd hitchhike, if I were you," he said. "That's the only sure way."

This was spoken to me in a town (pop. 52,000) on the coast of England in the summer of 1982. Hitchhike ... that's the only sure way. Good God.

I walked a few miles to Kessingland and then stuck out my thumb.

"My mistake was stopping too long in my jobs. And this Jewboy," Mr. Marwood said wearily as we drove toward Southwold, "though I didn't have anything against his religion, took advantage of me. I was earning five pounds, ten shillings in 1948. It was a good wage—I was sixteen. I was on commission. I started to sell cheese rolls—this was a grocery store, and we did a little bit of greengrocery. The profit on cheese rolls was five hundred percent. My commission was sixpence in the pound. I worked very hard, but when my wages went up to seven pounds this Jewboy claimed he couldn't pay me. i don't have that kind of money,' he said. Imagine. So I left. I just told him what he could do with his job, and I found another one. There's always work for people who want it."

Southwold was one of those coastal villages which had become remote with the closure of its railway. It was now emptier and more rural than it had been twenty years ago. On a small house on Main Street there was a plaque saying The Author George Orwell (E. A. Blair) Resided Here. It was after he had been down and out in Paris and London; he had no money; he lived with his parents—this was their house. He got his pen name from a river some distance south of here on the Essex coast—the Orwell.

"I always pick up hitchhikers," Mr. Grainer said. There was no coast path to Dunwich, only marshes and an intrusive estuary. Mr. Grainer picked up a silent man and then a girl with a rucksack, all in the space of a few miles. He never passed a hitchhiker if he had a spare seat.

"It's a lot of wear and tear on a car," I said.

Mr. Grainer laughed out loud. "Not my car!" He was delivering it to a car dealer, he said. That was his job, delivering cars. He was so badly paid for doing it, he took his revenge by picking up every hitchhiker he saw. He laughed again. "My guv'nor would do his nut if he saw me now."

The girl said to call her "Jerry." She was on vacation. She taught school in Africa—the Sudan.

"We get a lot of spare parts from South Africa," Mr. Grainer said.

Jerry said that the Sudan was not anywhere near South Africa.

"All the same to me," Mr. Grainer said, cheerfully. "Cannibals and communists!"

Dunwich ("once an important seaport, before the sea swept it away") was a disjointed village scattered thinly against a lumpy green shore. Everyone said how sad it was that it was no longer prosperous, but its prosperity had come in the Middle Ages, and by 1800 it was an impoverished fishing village. Its empty, depopulated atmosphere inspired ghost stories, tales of sinking spells that traveled through Dunwich houses, and the legend of the Black Dog, a phantom hound that appeared at night in the village and caused acute depression. Dunwich was one of the strangest places on the coast—famous for no longer existing.

Many villages on this shore were associated with ghosts. It was the low boggy land, the marshes, the fogs, the shifting sands, the long tides, and the medieval churches of cracked stone. Here were some of the oldest Christian graveyards in England, and they lay in a landscape that cast forth ghostly mirages. Some of this atmosphere had been invented by Montague Rhodes James in his powerful stories of the supernatural. But his topographical descriptions could be very accurate, especially when (in "A Warning to the Curious") he spoke of approaching a town and seeing "a belt of old firs, wind-beaten, thick at the top, with the slope that old seaside trees have; seen on the skyline from the train they would tell you in an instant, if you did not know it, that you were approaching a windy coast." That was Aldeburgh.

So some fictional landscapes were still worth revisiting. Aldeburgh, too, had lost its train, and from eighteen trains a day (nine in, nine out), it was now a parking lot lined with exquisite buildings, with a shingly beach riding over its streets. The Moot Hall displayed a message from Buckingham Palace that had just been nailed up: "We were both most touched by your very kind message on the birth of our son. We have been overwhelmed by the reaction to this exciting event. Best wishes."

***

At the bottom edge of Suffolk, the coast collapsed in a mass of marshes and estuaries. There was no coastal path. Strictly speaking, there was no coast, but only forty miles of low waterlogged land, and isolated towns at the end of long flat roads. It corresponded to the complexity of the Scottish coast at the opposite end of the country, except that this was sand, not rock, and instead of surf whipping into cliffs, this had a shallow sinking look. It was in and out to Felixstowe and Harwich and the Naze; I was fighting the strike, but also finding it funny that I now woke up in Walton-on-the-Naze and, packing my knapsack and oiling my shoes and putting an apple into my pocket and saying goodbye to Mrs. Dumper at the Elms, set off like a man with a mission. I may have looked something like Robert Byron on the road to Oxiana, but in fact I was on my way to Frinton-on-Sea.

Frinton had its surprises. It was posh. Who would have guessed it from its name? There was a settlement of houses behind a fence with the sign Frinton Gates; no trees—always an indication in an English suburb of a preference for rose gardens and herbaceous borders; large smug villas and a grassy Esplanade and not a chip shop in sight. It was a Tory stronghold; that was clear: you could tell by the tone of the golf club—by its forbidding gates. And Frinton was also sealed off from the rest of Britain. To get into the town it was necessary to go through a sort of valve, which was a level crossing on the railway line. It was a maddening bottleneck, but it had kept Frinton unviolated—it was the only way in or out of the place.

I walked on to Clacton, which was brash and noisy—holiday people, a holiday camp, trippers, and picnickers. I met a man named Arthur who said that if he had lived right, saved his money instead of losing it on the dogs, used his loaf instead of trusting people who had said they'd see him right, he would have ended up in Frinton in a detached house instead of a semidetached in Clacton. That was characteristic of the English: they did not allude to distant places on the coast when they were making comparisons. They would play with a mile or two and compare their lot in Bournemouth with what it might have been in Poole; they compared Brighton with Hove, Whitby with Sandsend, Exmouth with Budleigh Salterton. They did not reach far when they tried to imagine how their lives might have been different. And, really, Clacton wasn't so bad, Arthur said, when you compared it to Jaywick Sands.

"Jaywick's a shantytown," Arthur said.

It was. There was sand in the streets. People slept in the shallys. Most houses were shacks the size of one-car garages. Jaywick was crowded and cheap. It looked as though it had taken a terrific thumping—war or weather—and was awfully battered, like a seaside slum in Argentina or Mexico. It had the same grubby geniality, the same broken fences. The beach was empty. This was a Sunday in late July. Two women stood facing the murky sea. They were holding hands. I was especially fascinated by their affection, because the smaller one was pregnant. They were Roberta and Mandy; they had been living together in a borrowed bungalow at Jaywick for five months as a couple. Roberta had left her husband in Dagenham after she had met Mandy and realized she was a lesbian. She had been two months pregnant then. Mandy had been a tower of strength, and tonight they were going to a prenatal class of the National Childbirth Trust up in Clacton—breathing exercises and general awareness. Mandy said, "I'm her labor support." They were planning to raise the child themselves.

At last I took a bus to Southend, an inland detour, because there was no direct way across the flats and sands of the Essex coast. There were no trains running. The bus went over the hills with a natural bounce, and to the east it was impossible to tell the brown land from the brown sea; one ran into the other. Here, the sea was the River Thames at its widest part. I met Brenda Priestley on the bus. She had worked at Harvey Nichols Department Store in London. She had served Mahatma Gandhi one day. Handkerchiefs—a box of three, Irish linen, lovely they were. He seemed an odd one, though—wearing a sort of a nappy. I looked out the window, trying to imagine it, and saw sliding gulls, and a boy behind me muttered, "Sowfen."

Even Southend had a respectable district—the higher, leafier ledge called Westcliff. The seedy part of Southend was down the hill, below the crumbling white wedding cake of the Palace Hotel, and the Kursaal amusement park. This was where the gangs fought at Easter—and not only then, but on every Bank Holiday. Just a few months ago two thousand Skinheads had battled two thousand Mods. But they had not destroyed buildings; they had not broken windows or set fires. They had not even made much noise, people said. They had broken each others' heads on the Promenade along the seafront. To slow them down, the police confiscated their bootlaces as soon as the boys had gotten off the train at Southend Central.

This was high summer, but Southend was as empty as it had been in March. It was the effect of the strike in this railway resort. Without trains, it was hard to get in or out. Traditionally, it was for day-trippers—Londoners; its atmosphere wasn't briney and coastal—it was riverbank sag, the greasy Thames, London toughness. In many senses Southend was a part of London. The river was its spiritual link, but the river was not put to any practical use. The physical link, the railway, had been severed by the strike, and now Southend was revealed in this empty condition as a mixture of river rawness and sleazy elegance. The few people here were not vacationers. They were between jobs, between lives, waiting for something to open up. Other places could do without the railway, but Southend was strangling, because this seaside place was not on the way to anywhere except Foulness, which was one of the very few aptly named places in the country.

"That little geezer with the piggy eyes," a toothless young man named Ron Woodbag said. The isolation made people irritable. He was amazingly tattooed—his neck, his face, the backs of his hands. So was the fellow he was now addressing—spider webs on his forearms, Britannia on his chest, skulls on his knuckles. "I'm going to kill that geezer."

But Ron Woodbag did not do anything. This was in the Foresters' Arms. The jukebox was deafening, playing the hits of Britain's most popular music groups—Raw Sewage ("Kick It to Death"), Nupkins ("Yellow Pain"), Slag ("What You Like to Eat"), Gender-Bender ("Getting It Behind You"); and then a live group, Spurm, got up on the little stage and howled. They looked like ferrets; they had spiky hair and claws. But they were harmless—pale skinny English faces and bad teeth. The bikers and punks in the bar were well behaved. Like many other places I had seen in Britain, it looked much worse than it was. It was not vicious; it just had that dirty desecrated look that I thought of as English. There was no vice that I had seen, no red-light district, nothing wicked, nothing stirring after midnight, on the whole of the British coast.

***

Southend's pier, the longest one in the world, stretched for a mile and a half. It showed on route maps as a distinct feature, like Portland Bill. The end of this pier was as far as I wished to go in Britain.

On my second morning I strolled through Southend, past the dog-walkers ("Come here, Princess! Leave the man alone, Princess! Stop, girl! Princess, don't—oh, I am so sorry—") and down to the Front and to the pier. It was muddy underneath for more than a mile. The gulls were rasping in annoyance—mewing, barking, yapping, shrieking. I kept walking. The pier was so long and the air so polluted that Southend dissolved in the heat haze yonder. It was a fitting end to my trip. I had walked into the sea. But the tide was out. It was a sea of the filthiest mud.

Once, the English shore had been fabulous, and parts of it so hidden that the rock pools had never been touched by man. The magic had lasted for a long time. The creatures at the tide line had floated and swayed for eons—"since the creation of the world," Edmund Gosse wrote in Father and Son. He had seen it perfect in the 1850s and he compared the coast to Keats's Grecian urn, "a still unravished bride of quietness."

"All this is over and done with," he went on. "The ring of living beauty drawn about our shores was a very thin and fragile one. It had existed all those centuries solely in consequence of the indifference, the blissful ignorance of man ... No one will see again on the shore of England what I saw in my early childhood."

Every British person who knew the coast said that, and every single one of them was right. The rock pools of Devon and Cornwall had been violated, and Dunwich had sunk into the sea, and Prestatyn was littered, and Sunderland was unemployed. Oddest of all, there were hardly any ships on a coast that had once been crammed with them—"Once a great port," the guidebook always said of the seaside towns. And shipbuilding was finished, too—places like Maryport and Nefyn, which had made great ships for the world, were nothing now, and perhaps Clydeside and Belfast would follow them into obscurity. So much had withered and gone, and reckless people had done damage with their schemes; and didn't the hungry ocean also perpetually gain advantage on the kingdom of the shore?

One of the few boasts the British risked was that their country was changeless. In some trivial ways it was, but to an alien it seemed entirely irregular and unpredictable, changing from day to day. It was not a question of seismic shocks, but rather a steadier kind of erosion—like the seemingly changeless and consoling tide, in which there was always, in its push and pull, slightly more loss than gain. The endless mutation of the British coast wonderfully symbolized the state of the nation. In a quiet way the British were hopeful, and because in the cycle of ruin and renewal there had been so much ruin, they were glad to be still holding on—that was the national mood—but they were hard put to explain their survival. The British seemed to me to be people forever standing on a crumbling coast and scanning the horizon. So I had done the right thing in traveling the coast, and instead of looking out to sea, I had looked inland.

And the paradox was that Britain was changing constantly in unalterable ways. Perhaps that was another way of saying it was aging—"the same, only older," as people said of themselves in Bexhill-on-Sea, where it was bad manners—un-English—to mention death. I knew that the things I had seen would be changed, like Gosse's pretty pools of corallines and silken anemones. For example, a pressurized water reactor, like the one that had cracked and leaked at Three Mile Island, was planned for the Suffolk coast at Sizewell. And yet it is every traveler's conceit that no one will see what he has seen: his trip displaces the landscape, and his version of events is all that matters. He is certainly kidding himself in this, but if he didn't kid himself a little, he would never go anywhere.

Today I was done—I had no plans. Over there, across the Thames estuary at Margate, I had set out almost three months ago. It was not far across the river mouth—less than thirty miles. So I had made a connection. I had found a way of joining one end of this kingdom to the other, giving it a beginning and an end. I would not have done it differently in Africa. I felt I knew the world much better for having seen Britain—and I knew Britain so well and had been in its pockets so long, I felt impatient to leave; I had my usual bad dream that I would be forced to stay longer.

The tide came in. I was still at the end of the pier. I had never seen a tide rise so fast, from so far away. I could see it flowing across the foreshore as if it were being poured. It became a rippling flood. Now, after a few minutes, it was a foot deep. It was moving the boats, buoying them, rocking them on their keels. I saw a shallow dinghy, just like the one I had rowed from Bellanaleck to Carrybridge, across Lough Erne, past people standing in wet fields who were living their lives there. I had rowed back and forth, and then had gone away. Every day on the coast I had gone away, leaving people staring out at the ocean's crowded chop: "Our end is Life—put out to sea."

The rising tide took the smell away. Then the gulls flew off—and that was another thing about travel: these flights, these disappearances. It was no different in Britain from any other foreign place, except that a country could sound sad if you spoke the language.

Fish were jumping where there had been coils of rope sinking in the mud and the bubble holes. The boats were straightening and creaking. Now the sea was splashing against the pier. I sat there until all the boats were upright, even those big peeling motor launches. One hulk had been holed and did not rise—the water lapped at the roof of its wheelhouse. I did not want to think of a name for it. The tide was high. I started down the long pier toward shore, trying to figure out a way of getting home.