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

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.