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

9. The West Somerset Railway

TO THE EAST, beyond the gray puddly foreshore — the tide was out half a mile — I saw the bright flags of Butlin's, Minehead, and vowed to make a visit. Ever since Bognor I had wanted to snoop inside a coastal holiday camp, but I had passed the fences and gates without going in. It was not possible to make a casual visit. Holiday camps were surrounded by prison fences, with coils of barbed wire at the top. There were dog patrols and beware signs stenciled with skulls. The main entrances were guarded and had turnstiles and a striped barrier that was raised to let certain vehicles through. Butlin's guests had to show passes in order to enter. The whole affair reminded me a little of Jonestown.

And these elaborate security measures fueled my curiosity. What exactly was going on in there? It was no use my peering through the chain-link fence — all I could see at this Butlin's were the Boating Lake and the reception area and some snorers on deck chairs. Clearly, it was very large. Later I discovered that the camp was designed to accommodate fourteen thousand people. That was almost twice the population of Minehead! They called it "Butlinland" and they said it had everything.

I registered as a Day Visitor. I paid a fee. I was given a brochure and a booklet and Your Holiday Programme, with a list of the day's events. The security staff seemed wary of me. I had ditched my knapsack in a boardinghouse, but I was still wearing my leather jacket and oily hiking shoes. My knees were muddy. So as not to alarm the gatekeepers, I had pocketed my binoculars. Most of the Butlin's guests wore sandals and short sleeves, and some wore funny hats — holiday high spirits. The weather was overcast and cold and windy. The flags out front were as big as bedsheets and made a continual cracking. I was the only person at Butlin's dressed for this foul weather. I felt like a commando. It made some people there suspicious.

With its barrackslike buildings and its forbidding fences, it had the prison look of the Butlin's at Bognor. A prison look was also an army-camp look, and just as depressing. This one was the more scary for being brightly painted. It had been tacked together out of plywood and tin panels in primary colors. I had not seen flimsier buildings in England. They were so ugly, they were not pictured anywhere in the Butlin's brochure, but instead shown as simplified floor plans in blue diagrams. They were called "flatlets" and "suites." The acres of barracks were called the Accommodation Area.

It really was like Jonestown! The Accommodation Area with the barracks was divided into camps — Green, Yellow, Blue, and Red Camp. There was a central dining room and a Nursery Center. There was a Camp Chapel. There was also a miniature railway and a chairlift and a monorail — all of them useful: it was a large area to cover on foot. It was just the sort of place the insane preacher must have imagined when he brought his desperate people to Guyana. It was self-contained and self-sufficient. With a fence that high, it had to be.

The Jonestown image was powerful, but Butlin's also had the features of a tinselly New Jerusalem. This, I felt, would be the English coastal town of the future, if most English people had their way. It was already an English town of a sort — glamorized and less substantial than the real thing, but all the same recognizably an English town, with the usual landmarks, a cricket pitch, a football field, a launderette, a supermarket, a bank, a betting shop, and a number of take-away food joints. Of course, it was better organized and had more amenities than most English towns the same size — that was why it was popular. It was also a permanent fun fair. One of Butlin's boasts was "No dirty dishes to wash!" Another was "There is absolutely no need to queue!" No dishwashing, no standing in line — it came near to parody, like a vacation in a Polish joke. But these promises were a sort of timid hype; England was a country of modest expectations, and no dishes and no lines were part of the English dream.

It was not expensive—£178 ($313) a week for a family of four, and that included two meals a day. It was mostly families — young parents with small children. They slept in a numbered cubicle in the barracks at one of the four camps, and they ate at a numbered table in one of the dining rooms, and they spent the day amusing themselves.

The Windsor Sports Ground (most of the names had regal echoes, an attempt at respectability) and the Angling Lake were not being used by anyone the day I was there. But the two snooker and table tennis rooms were very busy; each room was about half the size of a football field and held scores of tables. No waiting! There was bingo in the Regency Building, in a massive room with a glass wall, which was the bottom half of the indoor swimming pool — fluttering legs and skinny feet in water the color of chicken bouillon. There was no one on the Boating Lake, and no one in the outdoor pool, and the chapel was empty. The Crazy Golf was not popular. So much for the free amusements.

"Yes, it is true, nearly everything at Butlin's is free!" the brochure said.

But what most of the people were doing was not free. They were feeding coins into fruit machines and one-armed bandits in the Fun Room. They were playing pinball. They were also shopping for stuffed toys and curios, or buying furs in the Fur Shop, or getting their hair done at the Hairdressing Salon. They were eating. The place had four fish-and-chip shops. There were tea shops, coffee bars, and candy stores. They cost money, but people seemed to be spending fairly briskly. They were also drinking. There were about half a dozen bars. The Embassy Bar (Greek statues, fake chandeliers, red wallpaper) was quite full, although it was the size of a barn. The Exmoor Bar had a hundred and fifty-seven tables and probably held a thousand drinkers. It was the scale of the place that was impressive — the scale and the shabbiness.

It was not Disneyland. Disneyland was a blend of technology and farce. It was mostly fantasy, a tame kind of surrealism, a comfortable cartoon in three dimensions. But the more I saw of Butlin's, the more it resembled English life; it was very close to reality in its narrowness, its privacies, and its pleasures. It was England without work — leisure had been overtaken by fatigue and dullwittedness: electronic games were easier than sports, and eating junk food had become another recreation. No one seemed to notice how plain the buildings were, how tussocky the grass was, or that everywhere there was a pervasive sizzle and smell of food frying in hot fat.

In that sense, too, it was like a real town. People walked around believing that it was all free; but most pastimes there cost money, and some were very expensive — like a ticket to the cabaret show that night, Freddie and the Dreamers, a group of middle-aged musicians who were a warmed-over version of their sixties' selves.

If it had a futuristic feel, it was the deadened imagination and the zombie-like attitude of the strolling people, condemned to a week or two of fun under cloudy skies. And it was also the arrangements for children. The kids were taken care of — they could be turned loose in Butlin's in perfect safety. They couldn't get hurt or lost. There was a high fence around the camp. There was a Nursery Chalet Patrol and a Child Listening Service and a large Children's Playground. In the planned cities of the future, provisions like this would be made for children.

Most of the events were for children, apart from whist and bingo. As a Day Visitor, I had my choice of the Corona Junior Fancy Dress Competition, a Kids' Quiz Show, the Trampoline Test, the Donkey Derby, or the Beaver and Junior Talent Contest Auditions. The Donkey Derby was being held in a high wind on Gaiety Green — screaming children and plodding animals. I went to the talent show auditions in the Gaiety Revue Theatre. A girl of eight did a suggestive dance to a lewd pop song; two sisters sang a song about Jesus; Amanda and Kelly sang "Daisy"; and Miranda recited a poem much too fast. Most of the parents were elsewhere — playing the one-armed bandits and drinking beer.

I wandered into the Camp Chapel ("A Padre is available in the Centre at all times"). There was a notice stuck to the chapel door: At all three services prayers are being said for our Forces in the Southern Atlantic. I scrutinized the Visitors' Book. It asked for nationality, and people had listed "Welsh" or "Cornish" or "English" or "Scottish" next to their names. There was a scattering of Irish. But after the middle of April people had started to put "British" for nationality — that was after the Falklands War had begun.

I found three ladies having tea in the Regency Building. Daphne Bunsen, from Bradford, said, "We don't talk about this Falklands business here, 'cause we're on holiday. It's a right depressing soobject."

"Anyway," Mavis Hattery said, "there's only one thing to say."

What was that?

"I say, 'Get it over with! Stop playing cat and mouse!'"

Mrs. Bunsen said they loved Butlin's. They had been here before and would certainly come back. Their sadness was they could not stay longer. "And Mavis' room is right posh!"

"I paid a bit extra," Mrs. Hattery said. "I have a fitted carpet in my shally."

It was easy to mock Butlin's for its dreariness and its brainless pleasures. It was an inadequate answer to leisure, but there were scores of similar camps all around the coast, so there was no denying its popularity. It combined the security and equality of prison with the vulgarity of an amusement park. I asked children what their parents were doing. Usually the father was playing billiards and the mother was shopping, but many said their parents were sleeping — having a kip. Sleeping until noon, not having to cook or mind children, and being a few steps away from the chippy, the bar, and the betting shop — it was a sleazy paradise in which people were treated more or less like animals in a zoo. In time to come, there would be more holiday camps on the British coast—"Cheap and cheerful," Daphne Bunsen said.

Butlin's was staffed by "Redcoats" — young men and women who wore red blazers. It was a Redcoat named Rod Firsby who told me that the camp could accommodate fourteen thousand people ("but nine thousand is about average"). Where did the people come from? I asked. He said they came from all over. It was when I asked him what sorts of jobs they did that he laughed.

"Are you joking, sunshine?" he said.

I said no, I wasn't.

He said, "Half the men here are unemployed. That's the beauty of Butlin's — you can pay for it with your dole money."

***

After Butlin's, my boardinghouse in the lower town seemed very tame. There were thirteen fragrant old ladies in residence for a week. They gushed about places like Wimbleball Reservoir and Clatworthy and Dunkery Beacon and the castle at Dunster. Sometimes they mentioned Lorna Doone in respectful tones. But they had read the novel. They were retired Welsh schoolteachers, very sweet-natured and precise and knowledgeable.

One night I watched Damien-Omen II with eight of them in the so-called T.V. Lounge — the back parlor, with extra chairs. I was astonished at the silliness of the movie, but I looked around the room and saw that the Welsh ladies were squinting seriously at it. It was so preposterous, I wanted to hoot. The Devil's son was somehow living with an American family — the fact that they were obscenely rich and living like lords in Chicago was supposed to make it believable. The Devil's son had flinty eyes and went to a military academy, where periodically he reverted to his devilish self, calling down Satan's wrath on the school bullies. There was often a shiny crow overhead, croaking and doing damage — wreaking havoc was how one was supposed to view it. Nothing in this plot made me regret that I had missed Omen I, but because I had missed it, I had to ask questions of the Welsh ladies. I always got prompt replies.

"Who is that man?"

"One of the Devil's Disciples," Miss Ellis said, with a slewed Welsh emphasis on the last syllable.

Some of the ladies were knitting. One read a newspaper during the commercial breaks. They chatted about Wimbleball and Dunster. But they were silent during the movie. Only I spoke up — because I was confused.

"What's that statue?"

"Oh, that will be the Whore of Babylon, I expect," Miss Thomas said in her sweet Welsh voice.

The little brat had 666 inscribed on his scalp.

"That's the Number of the Beast," Miss Ellis said.

But I hadn't asked.

"Revelations," Miss Parry-Williams said.

Toward midnight, after most of the characters had been murdered by the Devil's son, the film ended. The parlor was now filled with the syrupy smell of the Welsh ladies' cologne. They stifled yawns and stood up.

Miss Thomas said, "I shouldn't be a bit surprised if we saw Omen Three before very long! Good night, Gwyneth; good night, Alice: good night—"

***

The schoolteachers made me impatient to see Wales. They looked English, but their demeanor was amused and remote. They whispered at breakfast, they were very polite, even circumspect; they behaved as though in a foreign land.

There was no path on this stretch of coast to Bristol. I put my maps aside and took the West Somerset Railway. It was Britain's longest private line — twenty-five miles, operating between Minehead and Taunton. The British Rail service had ended in 1971. The West Somerset line was both a passion and a business for the people who ran it; some were volunteers. The station at Minehead had been preserved as a sort of usable antique, full of nostalgic signs advertising cigarettes and motor oil. That aspect — the backward-looking part of it — rather irritated me. The trouble with railway buffs was that they were not really interested in going anywhere. They were playing — taking photographs, posing on locomotives, collecting engine numbers. They relished the dusty aesthetics of railway lore.

They especially liked dressing up. That seemed to be part of the English character — entering into fantasy, putting on different clothes, and setting the old dull personality aside. It was what made amateur dramatics in England so energetic; drag acts here were so humorous that they did not need the justification of being wholesome. And so much of English life required costumes — clothes represented freedom or power or a new self. The members of the House of Lords wore ermine, and Oxbridge students wore robes, and even milkmen wore distinctive leather jerkins; and there was no more serious boast than a bowler hat. It was the railway buff who crossed the thin line between dressing up and travesty — the English seldom bothered to make much of a distinction between the two in any case. The reward for restarting a railway line was the chance to dress up as a Stationmaster or a Conductor or a Guard or even a Sweeper — with a uniform and special buttons and a distinct kind of hat.

The train was full of joy-riders pretending to be passengers; there and back, that was always the railway buff's itinerary. They liked the atmosphere. They took pictures of each other and of the woodwork and steam. We went along the shore to Dunster and its dark brown castle ("The Dutch embossed leather hangings are outstanding"), then on to Watchet, turning inland for Williton. Still the railway buffs snapped pictures and marveled at the old signs—"Woodbines" and "Pratt's Motor Spirit" and "Craven 'A'—Will Not Affect Your Throat." I gathered that these signs excited memories of the old days, when there were hundreds of trains like this rattling through the English hills. At just the point where the railway buff's excitement was at its most feverish ("Crikey, Rafe, don't it take you back?"), and they began unpacking sandwiches from their hampers and setting up their thermos flasks of hot tea, the train stopped at Bishops Lydeard and everyone was ordered out. We were put onto a bus and taken in silence to Taunton. So the West Somerset Railway was something like Butlin's Holiday Camp — lots of razzmatazz but not much substance. Somehow it was not the answer to the transport need in that part of Somerset.

***

On the 14:21 to Weston-super-Mare a man named Wilf pinched a piece of cigarette paper into a little gutter and then dropped strings of tobacco into it. He licked it and rolled it and twisted one end — it looked like a firecracker — and then turned to me and said, "Any idea what time we get to Bristol?"

I said I didn't know. "I'm going to Weston-super-Mare."

He set his cigarette on fire and then took it out of his mouth and said sheesh, expelling the smoke. "Better you than me."

And then, perhaps because he knew I was going to Weston-super-Mare, Wilf avoided me and showed no interest in conversation. Or perhaps my knapsack had put him off? And yet I found that wearing a knapsack was a kind of advertisement of willingness, and more than anything it stirred the English passion for giving directions. Giving directions here was a form of conversation. But Wilf just smoked and sulked, and when I got off the train he shook his head, as if indicating that I was making a big mistake.

Under a dark collapsing sky, Weston-super-Mare looked bleak and residential and rather funless. Like Bexhill and Worthing and some other places on the south coast, it was a large town with the soul of a suburb. And it was in such places that I regretted the endless roads of flat housefronts and pined for a little vulgarity or something vicious. In Weston-super-Mare I was directed to the Waxworks.

On the way there, down the Promenade, I saw that the wind had whipped the water into troughs. Even in this poor light there was a wonderful view — of Wales, of the two black islands, Flat Holm and Steep Holm, and at the end of the beach a curved loaf-shaped landspit called Brean Down. The beach was long and mostly empty and very gray, and it was flatter than the water. Parked on the sand, as in a cartoon of desert mirages, were a red Punch and Judy booth and two yellow huts, one labeled TEA-STALL and the OTHER SHELLFISH BAR. A flapping pennant said DONKEY RIDES—20 PENCE. The few people on the beach lay heavily bundled-up on the sand, like war wounded on a beachhead. Their faces were tight with discomfort. A fat old lady with wild hair, wearing a winter coat but barefoot, stood and howled, "Arthur!" The donkeys stamped and shuddered in a little group, looking thoroughly baffled. And here on the Promenade hunched-over ladies with big handbags tipped their stoutness into the wind and breathed loudly through their teeth. Across the street at the Winter Gardens people were buying tickets for tonight's show, Cavalcade of Song. Beyond the donkeys, beyond the fat barefoot lady and the Punch and Judy booth, a new island surfaced and sprouted trees. Then I saw it was a ship going by.

I was so unaccustomed to a place like Weston-super-Mare that with a little concentration I saw it in a surrealistic way. What were all these different things doing there? They had accumulated over the years, slowly, piling up like the tidewrack, and because it had happened so slowly, no one questioned it or found it strange. And this was also why I could spend days in the seaside resorts, fascinated by the way the natural coast had been deranged and cluttered. It did not matter much whether a town was pretty or ugly — anyway, ugly ones were often the most telling. The image of the tidewrack was accurate in some places, but other towns were like river mouths, where, mounting like silt, a century of pulverized civilization had been deposited, having floated from the darker interior of England.

At the Waxworks there were models of movie stars and sports figures on the first floor, and on the next floor there were murderers. The top floor showed various torture chambers. In his essay "The Decline of the English Murder," George Orwell wrote, "If one examines the murders which have given the greatest amount of pleasure to the British public, the murders whose story is known in its general outline to almost everyone and which have been made into novels and rehashed over and over again by the Sunday papers, one finds a fairly strong family resemblance running through the greater number of them." The "family resemblance" is a quiet respectable man who reluctantly decides on murder because it seems less disgraceful than, for example, being caught in adultery; the crime is meticulously planned and carried out — but there is a tiny slip and the murderer is caught. "With this kind of background, a crime can have dramatic and even tragic qualities which make it memorable and excite pity for both victim and murderer."

The murderers shown at the Waxworks suited this analysis, and they also illustrated the decline. Here was the Yorkshire Ripper (Peter Sutcliff) and the Black Panther (Donald Neilson). The Waxworks was popular partly because the English were law-abiding, and no one knows more inner turmoil or is so susceptible to the romance of wrongdoing than the law-abiding person. But it was also popular for a much more straightforward reason: in British law the criminal's privacy — and very often his identity — is strenuously protected. A man may murder and be caught and be found guilty without the public ever seeing his face. No picture of the Black Panther had ever been published. So the revelation of the wax figures excited the watcher like certain kinds of pornography, and the gory tableaux on the top floor — a whipping, a beheading, "The Death of a Thousand Cuts," had a similar interest for a person secretly starved for a bit of raw cruelty. It was like breaking a taboo, even though most of the murderers looked silly in lopsided wigs, and the torture victims looked like big shattered steak-and-kidney pies.

And perhaps there was a connection between murderers and seaside resorts. Typically, the murderer committed his crime — wife-poisoning was the stereotype — and then went to a watering place like Weston-super-Mare, because it was easy to blend in with the ill-assorted types who were found there. And he was caught on the Promenade. It was one of the paradoxes of English life that the most respectable-looking places and the most innocent circumstances excited the strongest suspicions of crime.

The next day I took the train to Bristol. I tried to interest myself in the St. Paul's District, where race riots had broken out the year before. There were gutted buildings, and some still stank of burned mattresses, but otherwise it seemed an ordinary slum. I spoke to an Indian sociologist, Dr. Barot, who said that the West Indian household had been very authoritarian. In the course of a generation or two the parents' authority had been weakened and the children had stopped submitting. In fact, the children had become British; but there was no work, there was anger and aimlessness, and very few bothered to study at the higher levels. Only a handful of blacks attended Bristol University.

"I could introduce you to some really angry blacks," a man named Fletcher said at my Bristol boardinghouse.

But then the weather turned fine again and I decided that, instructive though it would be to meet some really angry blacks in Bristol, it had not been my intention on this coastal jaunt to invite gloom. And in a general sort of way, I knew why they were angry. So I declined the introduction and crossed the River Severn, which at that point was also the sea.