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

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.