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

20. The 14:40 to Aberdeen

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

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.