To the Ends of the Earth: The Selected Travels

English Traits

ONCE, FROM BEHIND A CLOSED DOOR, I HEARD AN ENGLISHWOMAN exclaim with real pleasure, “They are funny, the Yanks!” And I crept away and laughed to think that an English person was saying such a thing. And I thought: They wallpaper their ceilings! They put little knitted bobble hats on their soft-boiled eggs to keep them warm! They don’t give you bags in supermarkets! They say sorry when you step on their toes! Their government makes them get a hundred-dollar license every year for watching television! They issue drivers’ licenses that are valid for thirty or forty years — mine expires in the year 2011! They charge you for matches when you buy cigarettes! They smoke on buses! They drive on the left! They spy for the Russians! They say “nigger” and “Jewboy” without flinching! They call their houses Holmleigh and Sparrow View! They sunbathe in their underwear! They don’t say “You’re welcome”! They still have milk bottles and milkmen, and junk dealers with horse-drawn wagons! They love candy and Lucozade and leftovers called bubble-and-squeak! They live in Barking and Dorking and Shellow Bowells! They have amazing names, like Mr. Eatwell and Lady Inkpen and Major Twaddle and Miss Tosh! And they think we’re funny?

The longer I lived in London, the more I came to see how much of Englishness was bluff and what wet blankets they could be. You told an Englishman you were planning a trip around Britain and he said, “It sounds about as much fun as chasing a mouse around a pisspot.” They could be deeply dismissive and self-critical. “We’re awful,” they said. “This country is hopeless. We’re never prepared for anything. Nothing works properly.” But being self-critical in this way was also a tactic for remaining ineffectual. It was surrender.

And when an English person said “we,” he did not mean himself — he meant the classes above and below him, the people he thought should be making decisions, and the people who should be following. “We” meant everyone else.

“Mustn’t grumble” was the most English of expressions. English patience was mingled inertia and despair. What was the use? But Americans did nothing but grumble! Americans also boasted. “I do some pretty incredible things” was not an English expression. “I’m fairly keen” was not American. Americans were show-offs — it was part of our innocence — we often fell on our faces; the English seldom showed off, so they seldom looked like fools. The English liked especially to mock the qualities in other people they admitted they didn’t have themselves. And sometimes they found us truly maddening. In America you were admired for getting ahead, elbowing forward, rising, pushing in. In England this behavior was hated — it was the way “wops” acted, it was “Chinese fire drill,” it was disorder. But making a quick buck was also a form of queue jumping, and getting ahead was a form of rudeness: A “bounder” was a person who had moved out of his class. It was not a question of forgiving such things; it was, simply, that they were never forgotten. The English had long, merciless memories.

Rambler

AS SOON AS I HAD LEFT DEAL I SAW A LOW, FLAT CLOUD, iron-gray and then blue, across the Channel, like a stubborn fogbank. The closer I got to Dover, the more clearly it was defined, now like a long battleship and now like a flotilla and now like an offshore island. I walked on and saw it was a series of headlands. It was France, looking like Brewster across Cape Cod Bay.

Ahead on the path a person was coming toward me, down a hill four hundred yards away; but whether it was a man or a woman I could not tell. Some minutes later I saw her scarf and her skirt, and for more minutes on those long slopes we strode toward each other under the big sky. We were the only people visible in the landscape — there was no one behind either of us. She was a real walker — arms swinging, flat shoes, no dog, no map. It was lovely, too: blue sky above, the sun in the southeast, and a cloudburst hanging like a broken bag in the west. I watched this woman, this fairly old woman, in her warm scarf and heavy coat, a bunch of flowers in her hand — I watched her come on, and I thought, I am not going to say hello until she does.

She did not look at me. She drew level and didn’t notice me. There was no other human being in sight on the coast, only a fishing boat out there like a black flatiron. Hetta Poumphrey — I imagined that was the woman’s name — was striding, lifting the hem of her coat with her knees. Now she was a fraction past me, and still stony-faced.

“Morning!” I said.

“Oh.” She twisted her head at me. “Good morning!”

She gave me a good smile, because I had spoken first. But if I hadn’t, we would have passed each other, Hetta and I, in that clifftop meadow — not another soul around — five feet apart, in the vibrant silence that was taken for safety here without a word.

Falklands News

THE HOTEL WAS NOT FULL — A DOZEN MEN, ALL OF THEM middle-aged and hearty and full of chat, making a remark and then laughing at it too loudly. They had been beating up and down the coast with cases of samples, and business was terrible. You mentioned a town, any town — Dover — and they always said, “Dover’s shocking.” They had the harsh, kidding manner of traveling salesmen, a clumsy carelessness with the waitresses, a way of making the poor girls nervous, bullying them because they had had no luck with their own wives and daughters.

Mr. Figham, motor spares and car accessories, down from Maidstone, said the whole of Kent was his “parish”—his territory, shocking place. He was balding and a little boastful and salesman-skittish; he asked for the sweets trolley, and as the pretty waitress stopped, he looked at the way her uniform tightened against her thigh and said, “That chocolate cake tickles my fancy—”

The waitress removed the cake dish.

“—and it’s about the only thing that does, at my age.”

Mr. Figham was not much more than fifty, and the three other men at his table, about the same age, laughed in a sad agreeing way, acknowledging that they were impotent and being a little wry about their sorry cocks not working properly. To eavesdrop on middle-aged Englishmen was often to hear them commenting on their lack of sexual drive.

I sat with all the salesmen later that night watching the hotel’s television, the Falklands news. There was some anticipation. “I was listening to my car radio as I came down the M-Twenty.… One of my people said … A chap’s supply in Ashford had heard …” But no one was definite — no one dared. “… something about British casualties …”

It was the sinking of the Sheffield. The news was announced on television. It silenced the room: the first British casualties, a brand-new ship. Many men were dead and the ship was still burning.

As long as the Falklands War had been without British deaths, it was an ingenious campaign, clever footwork, an adventure. That was admired here: a nimble reply, no blood, no deaths. But this was dreadful and incriminating, and it had to be answered. It committed Britain to a struggle that no one really seemed to want.

One of the salesmen said, “That’ll take the wind out of our sails.”

There was a Chinese man in the room. He began to speak — the others had been watching him, and when he spoke they looked sharply at him, as if expecting him to say something in Chinese. But he spoke in English.

He said, “That’s a serious blow for us.”

Everyone murmured, Yes, that was a serious blow for us, and What next? But I didn’t open my mouth, because already I felt like an enemy agent. I agreed with what the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges had said about this Falklands War: “It is like two bald men fighting over a comb.”

John Bratby

A MAN IN HASTINGS SAID TO ME, “WHY DID I COME HERE to live? That’s easy. Because it is one of the three cheapest places in England.” He told me the other two, but in my enthusiasm to know more about Hastings I forgot to write the others down. This man was the painter John Bratby. He did the paintings for the movie The Horse’s Mouth, and his own life somewhat resembled that of Gulley Jimson, the painter hero of the Joyce Cary novel on which the movie was based.

Mr. Bratby was speaking in a room full of paintings, some of them still wet. He said, “I could never buy a house this large in London or anywhere else. I’d have a poky flat if I didn’t live in Hastings.”

His house was called the Cupola and Tower of the Winds and it matched its name. It was tall and crumbling, and it creaked when the wind blew, and there were stacks of paintings leaning against every wall. Mr. Bratby was thickset and had the listening expression of a forgetful man. He said he painted quickly. He sometimes referred to his famous riotous past — so riotous, it had nearly killed him. He had been a so-called kitchen sink painter with a taste for drawing rooms. Now he lived in a quiet way. He said he believed that Western society was doomed, but he said this as he looked out of his Cupola window at the rooftops and the sea of Hastings, a pleasant view.

“Our society is changing from one based on the concept of the individual and freedom,” Mr. Bratby said, “to one where the individual is nonexistent — lost in a collectivist state.”

I said I didn’t think it would be a collectivist state so much as a wilderness in which most people lived hand to mouth, and the rich would live like princes — better than the rich had ever lived, except that their lives would constantly be in danger from the hungry, predatory poor. All the technology would serve the rich, but they would need it for their own protection and to ensure their continued prosperity. The poor would live like dogs. They would be dangerous and pitiful, and the rich would probably hunt them for sport.

This vision of mine did not rouse Mr. Bratby, who was at that moment painting my portrait—“There is no commercial consideration to this at all.” He had said of my painting, “This is for posterity to see, when our society has completely changed.” He did not reject my description of the future. He scratched his head and went on dreading a police state where everyone wore baggy blue suits and called each other “Comrade”—the Orwell nightmare, which was a warning rather than a reasonable prediction. Anyway, it was almost 1984, and here was J. Bratby in a delightful wreck of a house, painting his heart out in Hastings, the bargain paradise of the south coast!

It seemed to me that his fear of the future was actually a hatred of the present, and yet he was an otherwise cheery soul and full of projects (“Guess what it is — the long one. It’s all the Canterbury pilgrims. Chaucer, you see.”). He said he never traveled but that his wife was very keen on it — had always wanted to go to New Orleans, for some reason. Now, his wife, Pam, was very attentive. She wore red leather trousers and made me a bacon sandwich. Bratby said that he had met her through a lonely hearts column, one of those classified ads that say LONELY GENT, 54, STOUT BUT NOT FAT, A PAINTER BY PROFESSION, SOUTH COAST, WISHES TO MEET … In this way they had met and had hit it off and got married.

Shallys

HOVE, LIKE MANY OTHER PLACES ON THE ENGLISH COAST, had chalets. The name was misleading. They were huts, and chalet was mispronounced to suit them: “shally,” the English said, an appropriate word made out of shanty and alley. There were hundreds of them shoulder to shoulder along the Front. They had evolved from bathing machines, I guessed. The English were prudish about nakedness (and swimming for the Victorians had been regarded as the opposite of a sport — it was a sort of immersion cure, a cross between colonic irrigation and baptism). The bathing machine — a shed on a pair of wheels — had been turned into a stationary changing room, and then arranged in rows on the beachfront, and at last had become a miniature house — a shally.

Hove’s shallys were the size of English garden sheds. I looked into them, fully expecting to see rusty lawnmowers and rakes and watering cans. Sometimes they held bicycles, but more often these one-room shallys were furnished like dollhouses or toy bungalows. You could see what the English considered essential to their comfort for a day at the beach. They were painted, they had framed prints (cats, horses, sailboats) on the wall and plastic roses in jam-jar vases. All had folding deck chairs inside and a shelf at the rear on which there was a hotplate and a dented kettle and some china cups. They were fitted out for tea and naps — many had camp cots, plastic cushions, and blankets; some had fishing tackle; a few held toys. It was not unusual to see half a fruitcake, an umbrella, and an Agatha Christie inside; and most held an old person, looking flustered.

All the shallys had numbers, some very high numbers, testifying to their multitude. But the numbers did not distinguish them, for they all had names: Seaview, the Waves, Sunny Hours, Bide-a-Wee, picked out on their doors or else lettered on plaques. They had double doors; some looked more like horse boxes than cottages. They had curtains. They had folding panels to keep out the wind. Many had a transistor radio buzzing, but the shally people were old-fashioned — they actually were the inheritors of the bathing-machine mentality — and they called their radios “the wireless” or even “my steam radio.”

They were rented by the year, or leased for several years, or owned outright — again, like bathing machines. But they were thoroughly colonized. They had small framed photographs of children and grandchildren. When it rained, their occupiers sat inside with their knees together, one person reading, the other knitting or snoozing, always bumping elbows. In better weather they did these things just outside, a foot or so from the front door. I never saw a can of beer or a bottle of whisky in a shally. The shally people had lived through the war. They had no money but plenty of time. They read newspapers, and that day everyone looked as if he were boning up for an exam on the Falklands campaign. It was becoming a very popular war.

The shallys were very close together, but paradoxically they were very private. In England, proximity creates invisible barriers. Each shally seemed to stand alone, no one taking any notice of the activity next door. Seaview was having tea while the Waves pondered the Daily Express; Sunny Hours was taking a siesta, and the pair at Bide-a-Wee were brooding over their mail. All conversation was in whispers. The shallys were not a community. Each shally was separate and isolated, nothing neighborly about it. Each had its own English atmosphere of hectic calm. A bylaw stipulated that no one was allowed to spend a night in a shally, so the shally was a daylight refuge, and it was used with the intense preoccupation and the sort of all-excluding privacy that the English bring to anything they own — not creating any disturbance or encroaching on anyone else’s shally, and not sharing. Anyone who wished to know how the English lived would get a good idea by walking past the miles of these shallys, for while the average English home was closed to strangers — and was closed to friends, too: nothing personal, it just isn’t done — the shally was completely open to the stranger’s gaze, like the dollhouses they somewhat resembled that had one wall missing. It was easy to look inside. That’s why no one ever did.

Bognor

I STAYED IN BOGNOR LONGER THAN I HAD PLANNED. I GREW to like Miss Pottage at Camelot. The beach was fine in the sunshine, and there was always an old man selling huge, horrible whelks out of a wooden box on the Front. He said he caught them himself. It was sunny, but the shops were closed and the Front was deserted. The season hadn’t started, people said.

I began to think that Bognor had been misrepresented. The oral tradition of travel in Britain was a shared experience of received opinion. Britain seemed small enough and discussed enough to be known at second hand. Dickens was known that way: it was an English trait to know about Dickens and Dickens’s characters without ever having read him. Places were known in this same way. That was why Brighton had a great reputation and why Margate was avoided. Dover, people said, the white cliffs of Dover. And Eastbourne’s lovely. And the Sink Ports, they’re lovely, too. It was Dickens all over again, and with the same sort of distortions, the same prejudices, and some places they had all wrong.

“I don’t know as much as I should about Dungeness,” a man said to me, who didn’t know anything about it at all. I went away laughing.

Broadstairs was serious, but Bognor was a joke. I was told, “It’s like Edward the Seventh said”—it was George the Fifth—“his last words before he died. ‘Bugger Bognor!’ That’s what I say.” Bognor had an unfortunate name. Any English place name with bog or bottom in it was doomed. (“The bowdlerization of English place names has been a steady development since the late eighteenth century. In Northamptonshire alone, Buttocks Booth became Boothville, Pisford became Pitsford, and Shitlanger was turned into Shutlanger.”) Camber Sands had a nice rhythmical lilt and was seen as idyllic — but it wasn’t; Bognor contained a lavatorial echo, so it was seen as scruffy — but it wasn’t. All English people had opinions on which seaside places in England were pleasant and which were a waste of time. This was in the oral tradition. The English seldom traveled at random. They took well-organized vacations and held very strong views on places to which they had never been.

Sad Captain

I WALKED ALONG WEST CLIFF AND DOWN A ZIGZAG PATH TO the promenade. I was not quite sure where I was headed, but this was the right direction — west; I had been going west for weeks. I walked past Alum Chine, where Stevenson wrote “Dr. Jekyll” (Bournemouth was the most literary place, with the ghosts of Henry James, Paul Verlaine, Tess Durbeyfield, Mary Shelley, and a half a dozen others haunting its chines) and then, looking west, and seeing the two standing rocks on the headland across the bay, called Old Harry and Old Harry’s Wife, I decided to walk to Swanage, about fourteen miles along the coast.

My map showed a ferry at a place called Sandbanks, the entrance to Poole Harbour. I wondered whether it was running — the season had not started — so, not wishing to waste my time, I asked a man on the Promenade.

“I don’t know about any ferry,” he said.

He was an old man and had gray skin and he looked fireproof. His name was Desmond Bowles, and I expected him to be deaf. But his hearing was very good. He wore a black overcoat.

“What are those boys doing?” he demanded.

They were windsurfing, I explained.

“All they do is fall down,” he said.

One of the pleasures of the coast was watching windsurfers teetering and falling into the cold water, and trying to climb back and falling again. This sport was all useless struggle.

“I’ve just walked from Pokesdown—”

That was seven miles away.

“—and I’m eighty-six years old,” Mr. Bowles said.

“What time did you leave Pokesdown?”

“I don’t know.”

“Will you walk it again?”

“No,” Mr. Bowles said. But he kept walking. He walked stiffly, without pleasure. His feet were huge, he wore old, shiny, bulging shoes, and his hat was crushed in his hand. He swung the hat for balance and faced forward, panting at the Promenade. “You can walk faster than me — go on, don’t let me hold you up.”

But I wanted to talk to him: eighty-six and he had just walked from Pokesdown! I asked him why.

“I was a stationmaster there, you see. Pokesdown and Boscombe — those were my stations. I was sitting in my house — I’ve got a bungalow over there”—he pointed to the cliff—“and I said to myself, ‘I want to see them again.’ I took the train to Pokesdown and when I saw it was going to be sunny I reckoned I’d walk back. I retired from the railways twenty-five years ago. My father was in the railways. He was transferred from London to Portsmouth and of course I went with him. I was just a boy. It was 1902.”

“Where were you born?”

“London,” he said.

“Where, in London?”

Mr. Bowles stopped walking. He was a big man. He peered at me and said, “I don’t know where. But I used to know.”

“How do you like Bournemouth?”

“I don’t like towns,” he said. He started to walk again. He said, “I like this.”

“What do you mean?”

He motioned with his crumpled hat, swinging it outward.

He said, “The open sea.”

It was early in my trip, but already I was curious about English people in their cars staring seaward, and elderly people in deck chairs all over the south coast watching waves, and now Mr. Bowles, the old railwayman, saying, “I like this … the open sea.” What was going on here? There was an answer in Elias Canetti’s Crowds and Power, an unusual and brilliant — some critics have said eccentric — analysis of the world of men in terms of crowds. There are crowd symbols in nature, Canetti says — fire is one, and rain is another, and the sea is a distinct one. “The sea is multiple, it moves, and it is dense and cohesive”—like a crowd—“Its multiplicity lies in its waves”—the waves are like men. The sea is strong, it has a voice, it is constant, it never sleeps, “it can soothe or threaten or break out in storms. But it is always there.” Its mystery lies in what it covers: “Its sublimity is enhanced by the thought of what it contains, the multitudes of plants and animals hidden within it.” It is universal and all-embracing; “it is an image of stilled humanity; all life flows into it and it contains all life.”

Later in his book, when he is dealing with nations, Canetti describes the crowd symbol of the English. It is the sea: all the triumphs and disasters of English history are bound up with the sea, and the sea has offered the Englishman transformation and danger. “His life at home is complementary to life at sea: security and monotony are its essential characteristics.”

“The Englishman sees himself as a captain,” Canetti says: this is how his individualism relates to the sea.

So I came to see Mr. Bowles, and all those old south coast folk staring seaward, as sad captains fixing their attention upon the waves. The sea murmured back at them. The sea was a solace. It contained all life, of course, but it was also the way out of England — and it was the way to the grave, seaward, out there, offshore. The sea had the voice and embrace of a crowd, but for this peculiar nation it was not only a comfort, representing vigor and comfort. It was an end, too. Those people were looking in the direction of death.

Mr. Bowles was still slogging along beside me. I asked him if he had fought in the First World War.

“First and Second,” he said. “Both times in France.” He slowed down, remembering. He said, “The Great War was awful … it was terrible. But I wasn’t wounded. I was in it for four years.”

“But you must have had leave,” I said.

“A fortnight,” he said, “in the middle.”

Mr. Bowles left me at Canford Cliffs, and I walked on to Sandbanks.

(1) B & B: Victory Guest House

“YOU’RE ALONE?” MRS. STARLING SAID AT THE VICTORY Guest House, glancing at my knapsack, my leather jacket, my oily shoes.

“So far,” I said.

“I’ll show you to your room,” she said, a little rattled by my reply.

I was often warmed by a small thrill in following the younger landladies up four flights to the tiny room at the top of the house. We would enter, breathless from the climb, and stand next to the bed somewhat flustered, until she remembered to ask for the £5 in advance — but even that was ambiguous and erotic.

Most of them said, You’re alone? or Just a single, then? I never explained why. I said I was in publishing. I said I had a week off. I did not say that I had no choice but to travel alone, because I was taking notes and stopping everywhere to write them. I could think clearly only when I was alone, and then my imagination began to work as my mind wandered. They might have asked: How can you bear your own company? I would have had to reply: Because I talk to myself — talking to myself has always been part of my writing and, by the way, I’ve been walking along the seawall from Dawlish in the rain muttering, “Wombwell … warmwell … nutwell … cathole …”

(2) B & B. The Puttocks

ABOUT A HALF HOUR AFTER ARRIVING IN NEWQUAY I WAS sitting in a parlor, a dog chewing my shoe, and having a cup of tea with Florence Puttock (“I said leave that shoe alone!”), who was telling me about the operation on her knee. It was my mention of walking that brought up the subject of the feet, legs, knees, and her operation. And the television was on — there was a kind of disrespect these days in not turning it on for Falklands news. And Queenie, the other Peke, had a tummy upset. And Mrs. Puttock’s cousin Bill hadn’t rung all day — he usually rang just after lunch. And Donald Puttock, who lisped and was sixty-one — he had taken early retirement because of his back — Donald was watching the moving arrows on the Falklands map and listening to Florence talking about ligaments, and he said, “I spent me ’ole life in ’ornchurch.”

Somehow, I was home.

But it was not my home. I had burrowed easily into this cozy privacy, and I could leave any time I wished. I had made the choice, for the alternatives in most seaside towns were a hotel, or a guest house, or a bed-and-breakfast place. This last alternative always tempted me, but I had to feel strong to do it right. A bed-and-breakfast place was a bungalow, usually on a suburban street some distance from the Front and the Promenade and the hotels. It was impossible to enter such a house and not feel you were interrupting a domestic routine — something about Florence’s sewing and Donald’s absurd slippers. The house always smelled of cooking and disinfectant, but most of all it smelled of in-laws.

It was like every other bungalow on the street, except for one thing. This one had a sign in the window saying VACANCIES. I had the impression that this was the only expense in starting such an establishment. You went over to Maynards and bought a VACANCIES sign, and then it was simply a matter of airing out the spare bedroom. Soon, an odd man would show up — knapsack, leather jacket, oily hiker’s shoes — and spend an evening listening to the householders’ stories of the high cost of living, or the greatness of Bing Crosby, or a particularly painful operation. The English, the most obsessively secretive people in their day-today living, would admit you to the privacy of their homes, and sometimes even unburden themselves, for just £5. “I’ve got an awful lot on my plate at the moment,” Mrs. Spackle would say. “There’s Bert’s teeth, the Hoover’s packed up, and my Enid thinks she’s in the family way.…” When it was late, and everyone else in bed, the woman you knew as Mrs. Garlick would pour you a schooner of cream sherry, say, “Call me Ida,” and begin to tell you about her amazing birthmark.

Bed and breakfast was always vaguely amateur, the woman of the house saying she did it because she liked to cook, and could use a little extra cash (“money for jam”), and she liked company, and their children were all grown up, and the house was rather empty and echoey. The whole enterprise of bed and breakfast was carried on by the woman, but done with a will, because she was actually getting paid for doing her normal household chores. No special arrangements were required. At its best it was like a perfect marriage; at its worst it was like a night with terrible in-laws. Usually I was treated with a mixture of shyness and suspicion; but that was traditional English hospitality — wary curiosity and frugal kindness.

The English required guests to be uncomplaining, and most of the lower-middle-class people who ran bed-and-breakfast places were intolerant of a guest’s moaning, and they thought — with some justification — that they had in their lives suffered more than that guest. “During the war,” they always began, and I knew I was about to lose the argument in the face of some evidence of terrible hardship. During the war, Donald Puttock was buzz-bombed by the Germans as he crouched under his small staircase in Homchurch, and, as he often said, he was lucky to be alive.

I told him I was traveling around the coast.

“Just what we did!” Mr. Puttock said. He and Florence had driven from Kent to Cornwall in search of a good place to live. They had stopped in all the likely places. Newquay was the best. They would stay here until they died. If they moved at all (Florence wanted fewer bedrooms), it would be down the road.

“Course, the local people ’ere ’ate us,” Mr. Puttock said, cheerfully.

“Donald got his nose bitten off the other day by a Cornishman,” Mrs. Puttock said. “Still hasn’t got over it.”

“I don’t give a monkey’s,” Mr. Puttock said.

Later, Mrs. Puttock said that she had always wanted to do bed and breakfast. She wasn’t like some of them, she said, who made their guests leave the house after breakfast and stay away all day — some of these people you saw in the bus shelter, they weren’t waiting for the number fifteen; they were bed-and-breakfast people, killing time. It was bed-and-breakfast etiquette to stay quietly out of the house all day, even if it was raining.

Mrs. Puttock gave me a card she had had printed. It listed the attractions of her house.

• TV Lounge

• Access to rooms at all times

• Interior-sprung mattresses

• Free parking space on premises

• Free shower available

• Separate tables

The lounge was the Puttocks’ parlor, the parking space was their driveway, the shower was a shower, and the tables tables. This described their house, which was identical with every other bungalow in Newquay.

I was grateful for the bed-and-breakfast places. At ten-thirty, after the Falklands news (and now every night there was “Falklands Special”), while we were all a bit dazed by the violence and the speculation and Mr. Puttock was saying, “The Falklands look like bloody Bodmin Moor, but I suppose we have to do something,” Mrs. Puttock would say to me, “Care for a hot drink?” When she was in the kitchen making Ovaltine, Mr. Puttock and I were talking baloney about the state of the world. I was grateful, because to me this was virgin territory — a whole house open to my prying eyes: books, pictures, postcard messages, souvenirs, and opinions. I especially relished looking at family photographs. “That’s us at the Fancy Dress Ball in Romford just after the war.… That’s our cat, Monty.… That’s me in a bathing costume.…” My intentions were honorable but my instincts were nosy, and I went sniffing from bungalow to bungalow to discover how these people lived.

(3) B & B: The Bull

MR. DEEDY AT THE BULL SAID, “SEE, NO ONE WANTS TO make plans ahead. They go on working. It’s not only the money. They don’t like to go away, because they don’t know whether they’ll have jobs to go back to.”

Then “Falklands Special” was on television, and we dutifully trooped toward Mrs. Deedy’s shout of “It’s the news!” The news was very bad: more deaths, more ships sunk. But there was always great bewilderment among people watching the news, because there was never enough of it and it was sometimes contradictory. Why were there so few photographs of fighting? Usually it was reporters speaking of disasters over crackly telephones. The English seemed — in private — ashamed and confused, and regarded Argentina as pathetic, ramshackle, and unlucky, with a conscript army of very young boys. They hated discussing it, but they could talk all night on the subject of how business was bad.

“You just reminded me,” Mrs. Deedy said. “The Smiths have canceled. They had that September booking. Mr. Smith rang this morning.”

“Knickers,” Mr. Deedy said.

“His wife died,” Mrs. Deedy said.

“Oh?” Mr. Deedy was doubtful — sorry he had said knickers.

“She wasn’t poorly,” Mrs. Deedy said. “It was a heart attack.”

Mr. Deedy relaxed at the news of the heart attack. It was no one’s fault, really — not like a sickness or a crime. This was more a kind of removal.

“That’s another returned deposit,” Mrs. Deedy said. She was cross.

“That makes two so far,” Mr. Deedy said. “Let’s hope there aren’t any more.”

The next day I heard two tattling ladies talking about the Falklands. It was being said that the British had become jingoistic because of the war, and that a certain swagger was now evident. It was true of the writing in many newspapers, but it was seldom true of the talk I heard. Most people were like Mrs. Mullion and Miss Custis at the Britannia in Combe Martin, who, after some decent platitudes, wandered from talk of the Falklands to extensive reminiscing about the Second World War.

“After all, the Germans were occupying France, but life went on as normal,” Mrs. Mullion said.

“Well, this is just it,” Miss Custis said. “You’ve got to carry on. No sense packing up.”

“We were in Taunton then.”

“Were you? We were Cullompton,” Miss Custis said. “Mutterton, actually.”

“Rationing seemed to go on for ages!” Mrs. Mullion said.

“I still remember when chocolate went off the ration. And then people bought it all. And then it went on the ration again!”

They had begun to cheer themselves up in this way.

“More tea?” Mrs. Mullion said.

“Lovely,” Miss Custis said.

(4) B & B: Allerford

PORLOCK, THE HOME OF THE MAN WHO INTERRUPTED THE writing of “Kubla Khan,” was one street of small cottages, with a continuous line of cars trailing through it. Below it, on the west side of the bay, was Porlock Weir, and there were hills on all sides that were partly wooded.

A hundred and seventy years ago a man came to Porlock and found it quiet. But he did not find fault. He wrote: “There are periods of comparative stagnation, when we say, even in London, that there is nothing stirring; it is therefore not surprising that there should be some seasons of the year when things are rather quiet in West Porlock.”

I walked toward Allerford, and on the way fell into conversation with a woman feeding birds in her garden. She told me the way to Minehead — not the shortest way, but the prettiest way, she said. She had light hair and dark eyes. I said her house was beautiful. She said it was a guest house; then she laughed. “Why don’t you stay tonight?” She meant it and seemed eager, and then I was not sure what she was offering. I stood there and smiled back at her. The sun was shining gold on the grass and the birds were taking the crumbs in a frenzied way. It was not even one o’clock, and I had never stopped at a place this early in the day.

I said, “Maybe I’ll come back some time.”

“I’ll still be here,” she said, laughing a bit sadly.

There was an ancient bridge at Allerford. I bypassed it and cut into the woods, climbing toward the hill called Selworthy Beacon. The woods were full of singing birds, warblers and thrushes; and then I heard the unmistakable sound of a cuckoo, which was as clear as a clock, striking fifteen. The sun was strong, the gradient was easy, the bees were buzzing, there was a soft breeze; and I thought: This was what I was looking for when I set out this morning — though I had no idea I would find it here.

All travelers are optimists, I thought. Travel itself was a sort of optimism in action. I always went along thinking: I’ll be all right, I’ll be interested, I’ll discover something, I won’t break a leg or get robbed, and at the end of the day I’ll find a nice old place to sleep. Everything is going to be fine, and even if it isn’t, it will be worthy of note — worth leaving home for. Sometimes the weather, even the thin rain of Devon, made it worth it. Or else the birdsong in sunlight, or the sound of my shoe soles on the pebbles of the downward path — here, for example, walking down North Hill through glades full of azaleas, which were bright purple. I continued over the humpy hills to Minehead.

Holiday Camp

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 bed-sheets 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 barracks-like 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 funfair. 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 Hair-dressing 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 157 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 dull-wittedness: 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 — mat 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’s 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 fish-and-chip shop, 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.”

Happy Little Llanelli

LLANELLI HAD LOOKED PROMISING ON THE MAP. IT WAS IN the southwest corner of Dyfed, on the estuary of the Loughor River. I walked from the station to the docks. The town was musty-smelling and dull and made of decayed bricks. My map had misled me. I wanted to leave, but first I wanted to buy a guidebook to Wales in order to avoid such mistakes in the future.

I passed a store with textbooks in the window. Dead flies lay on their sides on the book covers; they had not been swatted, but had simply starved; they seemed asleep. There were shelves in this bookstore, but not many books. There was no salesperson. A husky voice came from behind a beaded curtain.

“In here.”

I went in. A man was whispering into a telephone. He paid no attention to me. There were plenty of books in here. On the covers were pictures of naked people. The room smelled of cheap paper and ink. The magazines were in cellophane wrappers. They showed breasts and rubber underwear, and there were children on some of them — the titles suggested that the naked tots were violated inside. No guidebooks here, but as this pornography shop was Welsh, the door had a bell that went bing-bong! in a cheery way as I left.

Welsh politeness was softhearted and smiling. Even Llanelli’s Skinheads were well behaved, and the youths with swastikas on their leather jackets and bleached hair and earrings or green hair and T-shirts saying ANARCHY! — even they seemed sweet-natured. And how amazing that the millions of Welsh, who shared about a dozen surnames, were the opposite of anonymous. They were conspicuous individuals and at a personal level tried hard to please. “You’re a gentleman!” one man would cry to another, greeting him on the street.

At Jenkins the Bakers (“Every bite — pure delight”) I saw a strawberry tart with clotted cream on top. Were they fresh strawberries?

“Oh, yes, fresh this morning,” Mrs. Jenkins said.

I asked for one.

“But they’re thirty pence, darling,” Mrs. Jenkins said, warning me and not moving. She expected me to tell her to forget it. She was on my side in the most humane way, and gave a commiserating smile, as if to say, It’s a shocking amount of money for a strawberry tart!

When I bought two, she seemed surprised. It must have been my knapsack and my vagabond demeanor. I went around the corner and stuffed them into my mouth.

“Good morning — I mean, good evening!” Mr. Maddocks the stationmaster said at Llanelli Station. “I knew I’d get it right in the end. It’s patience you want!”

The rest of the people on the platform were speaking Welsh, but on seeing the train draw in — perhaps it was the excitement — they lapsed into English.

Tenby

THE ELEGANT HOUSES OF TENBY STANDING TALL ON THE cliff reminded me of beautifully bound books on a high shelf — their bay windows had the curvature of book spines. The town was elevated on a promontory, so the sea on three sides gave its light a penetrating purity that reached the market square and fortified the air with the tang of ocean-washed rocks. It was odd that a place so pretty should also be so restful, and yet that was the case. But Tenby was more than pretty. It was so picturesque, it looked like a watercolor of itself.

It had not been preserved by the fastidious tyrants who so often took over British villages — the new class who moved in and gutted the houses, and then, after restoring the thatched roofs and mullioned windows, hid a chromium kitchen in the inglenook, which ran on microchips. Such people could make a place so picturesque that it was uninhabitable. Tenby had been maintained, and it had mellowed; it was still sturdy, and I was glad I had found it. But it was the sort of place that denied a sense of triumph to the person who secretly felt he had discovered it — because its gracefulness was well known; it had been painted and praised; it was old even in Tudor times; and it had produced Augustus John (who wrote about Tenby in his autobiography, Chiaroscuro), as well as the inventor of the equal sign (=) in mathematics, Robert Recorde. But, then, there were no secret places in Britain that I had seen; there were only forgotten places, and places that were being buried or changed by our harsh century.

Tenby had been spared, and it was the more pleasing for being rather quiet and empty. I walked around dreamily. For the first time since I had set out on this trip I felt that a watering place was fulfilling its purpose — calming me, soothing me, making me want to snore over a book on a veranda with a sea view.

Naked Lady

MY STRANGE ENCOUNTER TOOK PLACE AT THE HOTEL Harlech, a dismal semiruin not far from the silted-up river in Cardigan. It had been closed for years, and it smelled that way — of mice and unwashed clothes. The smell of rags is like the smell of dead men anyway, but this was compounded with the smells of dirt and wood smoke and the slow river. I knew as soon as I checked in that it was a mistake. I was shown to my room by a sulking girl of fifteen, who had a fat pouty face and a potbelly.

“It seems a little quiet,” I said.

Gwen said, “You’re the only guest.”

“In the whole hotel?”

“In the whole hotel.”

My bed smelled, too, as though it had been slept in — just slept in recently, someone having crawled out a little while ago, leaving it warm and disgusting.

The owner of the Harlech was a winking woman with a husky laugh, named Reeny. She kept a purse in the cleavage between her breasts; she smoked while she was eating; she talked about her boyfriend—“My boyfriend’s been all around the world on ships.” Reeny’s boyfriend was a pale unshaven man of fifty who limped through the hotel, his shirttails out, groaning because he could never find his hairbrush. His name was Lloyd, and he was balding. Lloyd seldom spoke to me, but Reeny was irrepressible, always urging me to come down to the bar for a drink.

The bar was a darkened room with torn curtains and a simple table in the center. There were usually two tattooed youths and two old men at the table, drinking beer with Lloyd. Reeny acted as barmaid, using a tin tray. And it was she who changed the records: the music was loud and terrible, but the men had no conversation, and they looked haggard and even rather ill.

The unexpected thing was that Reeny was very cheerful and hospitable. The hotel was dirty and her food unspeakable and the dining room smelled of urine, but Reeny was kind, and she loved to talk, and she spoke of improving the hotel, and she knew that Lloyd was a complaining old fake. Relax, enjoy yourself, have another helping, Reeny said. She had the right spirit, but the hotel was a mess. “This is Paul — he’s from America,” Reeny said, and winked at me. She was proud of me. That thought made me very gloomy.

One night she introduced me to Ellie. She was red-eyed and very fat and had a gravelly voice; she was somewhat toothless and freckled; she came from Swansea. “Aye,” she said. “Swansea’s a bloody bog.” Ellie was drunk — and she was deaf in the way drunks often are. Reeny was talking about America, but Ellie was still mumbling about Swansea.

“At least we’re not tight,” Ellie said. “Aye, we’re careful, but the Cardies are tight.”

“That’s us,” Reeny said. “Cardies, from Cardigan. Aye, we’re tighter than the Scots.”

Ellie screwed up her face to show how tight the Cardies were, and then she demanded to know why I was not drunk — and she appealed to the silent, haggard men, who stared back at her with dull damp eyes. Ellie was wearing a baggy gray sweater. She finished her pint of beer and then wiped her hands on her sweater.

“What do you think of the Cardies?” she said.

“Delightful,” I said. But I thought, Savages.

At midnight they were still drinking.

“I’m going upstairs,” I said.

“None of the rooms have locks,” Reeny said. “That’s why there are no keys. See?”

Ellie said, “Aarrgh, it’s a quiet place, Reen!”

“Too bloody quiet, I say,” Reeny said. “We have to drive to Saundersfoot for a little nightlife.”

Saundersfoot was thirty-three miles away.

“What is it, Lloyd?” Reeny said.

Lloyd had been grinning.

He said, “He looks worried,” meaning me.

“I’m not worried,” I said.

This always sounds to me a worried man’s protest. I stood there, trying to smile. The four local men at the table merely stared back with their haggard faces.

“There’s no locks in this place,” Lloyd said, with pleasure.

Then Reeny screeched, “We won’t rob you or rape you!”

She said it so loudly that it was a few seconds before I could take it in. She was vivacious but ugly.

I recovered and said, “What a shame. I was looking forward to one or the other.”

Reeny howled at this.

In the sour bed, I could hear rock music coming from the bar, and sometimes shouts. But I was so tired, I dropped off to sleep, and I dreamed of Cape Cod. I was with my cousin and saying to her, “Why do people go home so early? This is the only good place in the world. I suppose they’re worried about traffic. I’d never leave—”

Then something tore. It was a ripping sound in the room. I sat up and saw a tousled head. I thought it was a man. It was a man’s rough face, a squashed nose, a crooked mouth. I recognized the freckles and the red eyes. It was Ellie.

I said, “What are you doing?”

She was crouching so near to the bed that I could not see her body. The ripping sound came again — a zipper on my knapsack. Ellie was slightly turned away from me. She did not move. When I saw that it was Ellie and not a man, I relaxed — and I knew that my wallet and money were in my leather jacket, hanging on a hook across the room.

She said, “Where am I?”

“You’re in my room.”

She said, turning to me, “What are you doing here?”

“This is my room!”

Her questions had been drowsy in a theatrical way. She was still crouching near my knapsack. She was breathing hard.

I said, “Leave that thing alone.”

“Aarrgh,” she groaned, and plumped her knees against the floor.

I wanted her to go away.

I said, “I’m trying to sleep.” Why was I being so polite?

She groaned again, a more convincing groan than the last one, and she said, “Where have I left me clothes?”

And she stood up. She was a big woman with big jolting breasts and freckles on them. She was, I saw, completely naked.

“Close your eyes,” she said, and stepped closer.

I said, “It’s five in the morning, for God’s sake.”

The sun had just struck the curtains.

“Aarrgh, I’m sick,” she said. “Move over.”

I said, “You don’t have any clothes on.”

“You can close your eyes,” she said.

I said, “What were you doing to my knapsack?”

“Looking for me clothes,” she said.

I said in a pleading way, “Give me a break, will you?”

“Don’t look at me nakedness,” she said.

“I’m going to close my eyes,” I said, “and when I open them I don’t want to see you in this room.”

Her naked flesh went flap-flap like a rubber raincoat as she tramped across the hard floor. I heard her go — she pulled the door shut — and then I checked to see that my money was safe and my knapsack unviolated. The zippers were open, but nothing was gone. I remembered what Reeny had screamed at me: We won’t rob you or rape you!

At breakfast, Reeny said, “I’ve not been up at this hour for ten year! Look, it’s almost half-eight!”

Reeny had a miserable cough and her eyes were sooty with mascara. Her Welsh accent was stronger this morning, too.

I told her about Ellie.

She said, “Aye, is that so? I’ll pull her leg about that! Aye, that is funny.”

An old woman came to the door. She was unsteady, she peered in. Reeny asked her what she wanted. She said she wanted a pint of beer.

“It’s half-eight in the morning!” Reeny said.

“A half a pint, then,” the old woman said.

“And it’s Sunday!” Reeny said. She turned to me and said, “We’re dry on a Sunday around here. That’s why it’s so quiet. But you can get a drink at St. Dogmaels.”

The woman looked pathetic. She said that in the coming referendum she would certainly vote for a change in the licensing law. She was not angry, but had that aged, beaten look that passes for patience.

“Oh, heavens!” Reeny said. “What shall I do, Paul? You tell me.”

I said to the old woman, “Have a cup of tea.”

“The police have been after me,” Reeny said. “They’re always looking in.” Reeny walked to the cupboard. “I could lose my license.” She took out a bottle of beer and poured it. “These coppers have no bloody mercy.” The glass was full. “Forty-five pence,” she said.

The woman drank that and then bought two more bottles. She paid and left, without another word. She had taken no pleasure in the drink and there was no satisfaction in having wheedled the beer out of Reeny on a dry day in Cardigan — in fact, she had not wheedled, but had merely stood there gaping in a paralyzed way.

I said, “It’s a hell of a breakfast — a beer.”

“She’s an alcoholic,” Reeny said. “She’s thirty-seven. Doesn’t look it, does she? Take me, I’m thirty-three and no one believes it. My boyfriend says I’ve got the figure of a girl of twenty. You’re not going, are you?”

Jan Morris

EIGHT MORE MILES ON THIS SUNNY DAY AND WE DREW INTO Criccieth, where I hopped out of the train. I owned a guidebook that said, “Criccieth: For several years this small town was the home of James (now Jan) Morris, probably the finest living travel writer.” The “James (now Jan)” needed no explanation, since the story of how she changed from a man to a woman in a clinic in Casablanca was told in her book Conundrum, 1974. She still lived near Criccieth, outside the village of Llanystumdwy, in what was formerly the stables of the manor house, looking northward to the mountains of Eryri and southward to Cardigan Bay.

I seldom looked people up in foreign countries — I could never believe they really wanted to see me; I had an uncomfortable sense that I was interrupting something intimate — but I did look up Jan Morris. She had written a great deal about Wales, and I was here, and I knew her vaguely. Her house was built like an Inca fort, of large black rocks and heavy beams. She had written, “It is built in the old Welsh way, with rough gigantic stones, piled one upon the other in an almost natural mass, with a white wooden cupola on top. Its architecture is of the variety known these days as ‘vernacular,’ meaning that no professional architect has ever had a hand in it.”

She was wearing a straw calypso hat tipped back on her bushy hair, and a knit jersey, and white slacks. It was a very hot day and she was dressed for it. There is a certain educated English voice that is both correct and malicious. Jan Morris has such a voice. It was not deep but it was languid, and the maleness that still trembled in it made it sultry and attractive. There was nothing ponderous about her. She shrugged easily and was a good listener, and she laughed as a cat might — full-throated and with a little hiss of pleasure, stiffening her body. She was kind, reckless, and intelligent.

Her house was very neat and full of books and pictures. “I have filled it with Cymreictod — Welshness.” Yes, solid country artifacts and beamed ceilings and a NO SMOKING sign in Welsh — she did not allow smoking in her house. Her library was forty-two feet long and the corresponding room upstairs was her study, with a desk and a stereo.

Music mattered to her in an unusual way. She once wrote, “Animists believe that the divine is to be found in every living thing, but I go one further; I am an inanimist, holding that even lifeless objects can contain immortal yearnings.… I maintain, for instance, that music can permanently influence a building, so I often leave the record player on when I am out of the house, allowing its themes and melodies to soak themselves into the fabric.”

Perhaps she was serious. Inanimate objects can seem to possess something resembling vitality, or a mood that answers your own. But melodies soaking into wood and stone? “My kitchen adores Mozart,” the wise guy might say, or, “The parlor’s into Gladys Knight and the Pips.” But I did not say anything; I just listened approvingly.

“I suppose it’s very selfish, only one bedroom,” she said.

But it was the sort of house everyone wanted, on its own, at the edge of a meadow, solid as could be, well-lighted, pretty, painted, cozy, with an enormous library and study and a four-poster: perfect for a solitary person and one cat. Hers was called Solomon.

Then she said, “Want to see my grave?”

I said of course and we went down to a cool shaded wood by a riverside. Jan Morris was a nimble walker: she had climbed to twenty thousand feet with the first successful Everest expedition in 1953. Welsh woods were full of small twisted oaks and tangled boughs and moist soil and dark ferny corners. We entered a boggier area of straight green trees and speckled shade.

“I always think this is very Japanese,” she said.

It did look that way, the idealized bushy landscape of the woodblock print, the little riverside grotto.

She pointed across the river and said, “That’s my grave — right there, that little island.”

It was like a beaver’s dam of tree trunks padded all around with moss, and more ferns, and the river slurping and gurgling among boulders.

“There’s where I’m going to be buried — or rather scattered. It’s nice, don’t you think? Elizabeth’s ashes are going to be scattered there, too.” Jan Morris was married to Elizabeth before the sex change.

It seemed odd that someone so young should be thinking of death. She was fifty-six, and the hormones she took made her look a great deal younger — early forties, perhaps. But it was a very Welsh thought, this plan for ashes and a grave site. It was a nation habituated to ghostliness and sighing and mourning. I was traveling on the Celtic fringe, where they still believed in giants.

What did I think of her grave? she asked.

I said the island looked as though it would wash away in a torrent and that her ashes would end up in Cardigan Bay. She laughed and said it did not matter.

At our first meeting about a year before, in London, she had said suddenly, “I am thinking of taking up a life of crime,” and she had mentioned wanting to steal something from Woolworth’s. It had not seemed so criminal to me, but over lunch I asked her whether she had done anything about it.

“If I had taken up a life of crime I would be hardly likely to tell you, Paul!”

“I was just curious,” I said.

She said, “These knives and forks. I stole them from Pan American Airways. I told the stewardess I was stealing them. She said she didn’t care.”

They were the sort of knives and forks you get on an airplane with your little plastic tray of soggy meat and gravy.

Talk of crime led us to talk of arson by Welsh nationalists. I asked why only cottages were burned, when there were many tin caravans — as the English called mobile homes — on the coast that would make a useful blaze. She said her son was very pro-Welsh and patriotic and would probably consider that.

I said that the Welsh seemed like one family.

“Oh, yes, that’s what my son says. He thinks as long as he is in Wales he’s safe. He’ll always be taken care of. He can go to any house and he will be taken in and fed and given a place to sleep.”

“Like the travelers in Arabia who walk up to a Bedouin’s tent and say, ‘I am a guest of God,’ in order to get hospitality. Ana dheef Allah.”

“Yes,” she said. “It’s probably true — it is like a family here in Wales.”

And like all families, I said, sentimental and suspicious and quarrelsome and secretive. But Welsh nationalism was at times like a certain kind of feminism, very monotonous and one-sided.

She said, “I suppose it does look that way, if you’re a man.”

I could have said: Didn’t it look that way to you when you were a man?

She said, “As for the caravans and tents, yes, they look awful. But the Welsh don’t notice them particularly. They are not noted for their visual sense. And those people, the tourists, are seeing Wales. I’m glad they’re here, in a way, so they can see this beautiful country and understand the Welsh.”

Given the horror of the caravans, it was a very generous thought, and it certainly was not my sentiment. I always thought of Edmund Gosse saying, “No one will see again on the shore of England what I saw in my early childhood.” The shore was fragile and breakable and easily poisoned.

Jan Morris was still speaking of the Welsh. “Some people say that Welsh nationalism is a narrow movement, cutting Wales off from the world. But it is possible to see it as liberating Wales and giving it an importance — of bringing it into the world.”

We finished lunch and went outside. She said, “If only you could see the mountains. I know it’s boring when people say that — but they really are spectacular. What do you want to do?”

I said that I had had a glimpse of Portmeirion from the train and wanted a closer look, if there was time.

We drove there in her car and parked under the pines. She had known the architect Clough Williams-Ellis very well. “He was a wonderful man,” she said. “On his deathbed he was still chirping away merrily. But he was very worried about what people would say about him. Funny man! He wrote his own obituary! He had it there with him as he lay dying. When I visited him, he asked me to read it. Of course, there was nothing unflattering in it. I asked him why he had gone to all the trouble of writing his own obituary.

“He said, ‘Because I don’t know what The Times will write in the obituary they do of me.”

We walked through the gateway and down the stairs to the little Italian fantasy town on this Welsh hillside.

“He was obsessed that they would get something wrong or be critical. He had tried every way he could of getting hold of his Times obituary — but failed, of course. They’re always secret.”

She laughed. It was that hearty malicious laugh.

“The funny thing was, I was the one who had written his obituary for The Times. They’re all written carefully beforehand, you know.”

I said, “And you didn’t tell him?”

“No.” Her face was blank. Was she smiling behind it? “Do you think I should have?”

I said, “But he was on his deathbed.”

She laughed again. She said, “It doesn’t matter.”

There was a carved bust of Williams-Ellis in a niche, and resting crookedly on its dome was a hand-scrawled sign saying, THE BAR UPSTAIRS IS OPEN.

Jan said, “He would have liked that.”

We walked through the place, under arches, through gateways, past Siamese statuary and Greek columns and gardens and pillars and colonnades; we walked around the piazza.

“The trouble with him was that he didn’t know when to stop.”

It was a sunny day. We lingered at the blue Parthenon, the Chantry, the Hercules statue, the town hall. You think, What is it doing here? More cottages.

“Once, when we lost a child, we stayed up there in that white cottage.” She meant herself and Elizabeth, when they were husband and wife.

There was more. Another triumphal arch, the Prior’s Lodge, pink and green walls.

Jan said, “It’s supposed to make you laugh.”

But instead, it was making me very serious, for this folly had taken over forty years to put together, and yet it still had the look of a faded movie set.

“He even designed the cracks and planned where the mossy parts should be. He was very meticulous and very flamboyant, too, always in one of these big, wide-brimmed antediluvian hats and yellow socks.”

I was relieved to get out of Portmeirion; I had been feeling guilty, with the uncomfortable suspicion that I had been sight-seeing — something I had vowed I would not do.

Jan said, “Want to see my gravestone?”

It was the same sudden, proud, provocative, mirthful way that she had said, Want to see my grave?

I said of course.

The stone was propped against the wall of her library. I had missed it before. The lettering was very well done, as graceful as the engraving on a bank note. It was inscribed Jan & Elizabeth Morris. In Welsh and English, above and below the names, it said,

Here Are Two Friends

At the End of One Life

I said it was as touching as Emily Dickinson’s gravestone in Amherst, Massachusetts, which said nothing more than Called Back.

When I left, and we stood at the railway station at Porthmadog, Jan said, “If only these people knew who was getting on the train!”

I said, “Why should they care?”

She grinned. She said, “That knapsack — is that all you have?”

I said yes. We talked about traveling light. I said the great thing was to have no more than you could carry comfortably and never to carry formal clothes — suits, ties, shiny shoes, extra sweaters: what sort of travel was that?

Jan Morris said, “I just carry a few frocks. I squash them into a ball — they don’t weigh anything. It’s much easier for a woman to travel light than a man.”

There was no question that she knew what she was talking about, for she had been both a man and a woman. She smiled at me, and I felt a queer thrill when I kissed her good-bye.

Railway Buff

“I LOVE STEAM, DON’T YOU?” STAN WIGBETH SAID TO ME ON the Ffestiniog Railway, and then he leaned out of the window. He was not interested in my answer, which was, “Up to a point.” Mr. Wigbeth smiled and ground his teeth in pleasure when the whistle blew. He said there was nothing to him more beautiful than a steam “loco.” He told me they were efficient and brilliantly made; but engine drivers had described to me how uncomfortable they could be, and how horrible on winter nights, because it was impossible to drive most steam engines without sticking your face out the side window every few minutes.

I wanted Mr. Wigbeth to admit that they were outdated and ox-like, dramatic-looking but hell to drive; they were the choo-choo fantasies of lonely children; they were fun but filthy. Our train was pulled through the Welsh mountains by a Fairlie, known to the buffs as a “double engine”—two boilers—“the most uncomfortable engine I’ve ever driven,” a railwayman once told me. It was very hot for the driver because of the position of the boilers. The footplate of the Fairlie was like an Oriental oven for poaching ducks in their own sweat. Mr. Wigbeth did not agree with any of this. Like many other railway buffs, he detested our century.

This had originally been a tram line, he told me; all the way from Porthmadog to Blaenau Ffestiniog — horse trams, hauling slate from the mountain quarries. Then it was named the Narrow Gauge Railway and opened to passengers in 1869. It was closed in 1946 and eventually reopened in stages. The line was now — this month — completely open.

“We’re lucky to be here,” Mr. Wigbeth said, and checked his watch — a pocket watch, of course: the railway buff’s timepiece. He was delighted by what he saw. “Right on time!”

It was a beautiful trip to Blaenau, on the hairpin curves of the steep Snowdonia hills and through the thick evening green of the Dwyryd Valley. To the southeast, amid the lovely mountains, was the Trawsfynydd Nuclear Power Station, three or four gigantic gray slabs. An English architect, noted for his restrained taste, had been hired in 1959 to make it prettier, or at least bearable, but he had failed. Perhaps he should have planted vines. Yet this monstrosity emphasized the glory of these valleys. I found the ride restful, even with the talkative Mr. Wigbeth beside me. Then he was silenced by a mile-long tunnel. The light at the end of the tunnel was Blaenau Ffestiniog, at the head of the valley.

“Where are you off to, then?” Mr. Wigbeth asked.

“I’m catching the next train to Llandudno Junction.”

“It’s a diesel,” he said, and made a sour face.

“So what?”

“I don’t call that a train,” he said. “I call that a tin box!”

He was disgusted and angry. He put on his engine driver’s cap and his jacket with the railway lapel pins, and after a last look at his conductor-type pocket watch, he got into his little Ford Cortina and drove twenty-seven stop-and-go miles back to Bangor.

Llandudno

I WAS NOT FRIGHTENED AT THE HOTEL IN LLANDUDNO UNTIL I was taken upstairs by the pockmarked clerk, and then I sat in the dusty room alone and listened. The only sound was my breathing, from having climbed the four flights of stairs. The room was small; there were no lights in the passageway; the wallpaper had rust stains that could have been spatters of blood. The ceiling was high, the room narrow: it was like sitting at the bottom of a well. I went downstairs.

The clerk was watching television in the lounge — he called it a lounge. He did not speak to me. He was watching “Hill Street Blues,” a car chase, some shouting. I looked at the register and saw what I had missed before — that I was the only guest in this big, dark forty-room hotel. I went outside and wondered how to escape. Of course I could have marched in and said, “I’m not happy here — I’m checking out,” but the clerk might have made trouble and charged me. Anyway, I wanted to punish him for running such a scary place.

I walked inside and upstairs, grabbed my knapsack, and hurried to the lounge, rehearsing a story that began, “This is my bird-watching gear. I’ll be right back—” The clerk was still watching television. As I passed him (he did not look up), the hotel seemed to me the most sinister building I had ever been in. On my way downstairs I had had a moment of panic when, faced by three closed doors in a hallway, I imagined myself in one of those corridor labyrinths of the hotel in a nightmare, endlessly tramping torn carpets and opening doors to discover again and again that I was trapped.

I ran down the Promenade to the bandstand and stood panting while the band played “If You Were the Only Girl in the World.” I wondered if I had been followed by the clerk. I paid twenty pence for a deck chair, but feeling that I was being watched (perhaps it was my knapsack and oily shoes?), I abandoned the chair and continued down the Promenade. Later, I checked into the Queens Hotel, which looked vulgar enough to be safe.

Llandudno was the sort of place that inspired old-fashioned fears of seaside crime. It made me think of poisoning and suffocation, screams behind varnished doors, creatures scratching at the wainscoting. I imagined constantly that I was hearing the gasps of adulterers from the dark windows of those stuccoed terraces that served as guest houses — naked people saying gloatingly, “We shouldn’t be doing this!” In all ways, Llandudno was a perfectly preserved Victorian town. It was so splendid-looking that it took me several days to find out that it was in fact very dull.

It had begun as a fashionable watering place and developed into a railway resort. It was still a railway resort, full of people strolling on the Promenade and under the glass-and-iron canopies of the shop fronts on Mostyn Street. It had a very old steamer (“Excursions to the Isle of Man”) moored at its pier head, and very old hotels, and a choice of very old entertainments — Old Mother Riley at the Pavilion, the Welsh National Opera at the Astra Theatre doing Tosca, or Yorkshire comedians in vast saloon bars telling very old jokes. “We’re going to have a loovely boom competition,” a toothy comedian was telling his drunken audience in a public house near Happy Valley. A man was blindfolded and five girls selected, and the man had to judge — by touching them — which one’s bum was the shapeliest. It caused hilarity and howls of laughter; the girls were shy — one simply walked offstage; and at one point some men were substituted and the blindfolded man crouched and began searching the men’s bums as everyone jeered. And then the girl with the best bum was selected as the winner and awarded a bottle of carbonated cider called Pomagne.

I overheard two elderly ladies outside at the rail, looking above Llandudno Bay. They were Miss Maltby and Miss Thorn, from Glossop, near Manchester.

“It’s a nice moon,” Miss Maltby said.

“Aye,” Miss Thorn said. “It is.”

“But that’s not what we saw earlier this evening.”

“No. That was the sun.”

Miss Maltby said, “You told me it was the moon.”

“It was all that mist, you see,” Miss Thorn said. “But I know now it was the sun.”

Looking Seaward

NOW I SAW BRITISH PEOPLE LYING STIFFLY ON THE BEACH like dead insects, or huddled against the canvas windbreaks they hammered into the sand with rented mallets, or standing on cliffs and kicking stones roly-poly into the sea — and I thought: They are symbolically leaving the country.

Going to the coast was as far as they could comfortably go. It was the poor person’s way of going abroad — standing at the seaside and staring at the ocean. It took a little imagination. I believed that these people were fantasizing that they were over there on the watery horizon, at sea. Most people on the Promenade walked with their faces averted from the land. Perhaps another of their coastal pleasures was being able to turn their backs on Britain. I seldom saw anyone with his back turned to the sea (it was the rarest posture on the coast). Most people looked seaward with anxious hopeful faces, as if they had just left their native land.

Insulted England

THE REST OF THE COAST, FROM THE WINDOW OF THE TRAIN, was low and disfigured. There were small bleak towns like Parton and Harrington, and huge horrible ones like Workington, with its steelworks — another insolvent industry. And Maryport was just sad; it had once been an important coal and iron port, and great sailing ships had been built there in Victorian times. Now it was forgotten. Today there was so little shipbuilding on the British coast it could be said not to exist at all. But that was not so odd as the fact that I saw very few vessels in these harbors and ports — a rusty freighter, a battered trawler, some plastic sailboats — there was not much more, where once there had been hundreds of seagoing vessels.

I watched for more. What I saw was ugly and interesting, but before I knew what was happening, the line cut inland, passing bramble hedges and crows in fields of silage and small huddled-together farm buildings and church steeples in distant villages. We had left the violated coast, and now the mild countryside reasserted itself. It was green farms all the way to Carlisle — pretty and extremely dull.

KESWICK PUNKS, a scrawl said in Carlisle, blending Coleridge and Wordsworth with Johnny Rotten. But that was not so surprising. It was always in the fine old provincial towns and county seats that one saw the wildest-looking youths, the pink-haired boys and the girls in leopard-skin tights, the nose jewels and tattooed earlobes. I had seen green hair and swastikas in little Llanelli. I no longer felt that place names like Taunton or Exeter or Bristol were evocative of anything but graffiti-covered walls, like those of noble Carlisle, crowned with a castle and with enough battlements and city walls to satisfy the most energetic vandal. VIOLENT REVOLUTION, it said, and THE EXPLOITED and ANARCHY and SOCIAL SCUM. Perhaps they were pop groups? THE REJECTS, THE DEFECTS, THE OUTCASTS, THE DAMNED, and some bright new swastikas and THE BARMY ARMY. And on the ancient walls, SKINHEADS RULE!

Some of it was hyperbole, I supposed, but it was worth spending a day or so to examine it. It fascinated me as much as did the motorcycle gangs, who raced out of the oak forests and country lanes to terrorize villagers or simply to sit in a thatch-roofed pub, averting their sullen dirty faces. I did not take it personally when they refused to talk to me. They would not talk to anyone. They were English, they were country folk, they were shy. They were dangerous only by the dozen; individually they were rather sweet and seemed embarrassed to be walking down the High Street of dear old Haltwhistle in leather jackets inscribed HELL’S ANGELS or THE DAMNED.

The graffiti suggested that England — perhaps the whole of Britain — was changing into a poorer, more violent place. And it was easier to see this deterioration on the coast and in the provincial towns than in a large city. The messages were intended to be shocking, but England was practically unshockable, so the graffiti seemed merely a nuisance, an insult. And that was how I began to think of the whole country; if I had only one word to describe the expression of England’s face I would have said: insulted.

Mrs. Wheeney, Landlady

I EXPECTED FORMALITIES — CUSTOMS AND IMMIGRATION — Larne was so foreign-seeming, so dark and dripping, but there was not even a security check; just a gangway and the wet town beyond it. I wandered the streets for an hour, feeling like Billy Bones, and then rang the bell at a heavy-looking house displaying a window card saying VACANCIES. I had counted ten others, but this one I could tell had big rooms and big armchairs.

“Just off the ferry?” It was Mrs. Fraser Wheeney, plucking at her dress, hair in a bun, face like a seal pup — pouty mouth, soulful eyes, sixty-five years old; she had been sitting under her own pokerwork, REJOICE IN THE LORD ALWAYS, waiting for the doorbell to ring. “Twenty-one-fifteen it came in — been looking around town?”

Mrs. Wheeney knew everything, and her guest house was of the in-law sort — oppression and comfort blended, like being smothered with a pillow. But business was terrible: only one other room was taken. Why, she could remember when, just after the ferry came in, she would have been turning people away! That was before the recent troubles, and what a lot of harm they’d done! But Mrs. Wheeney was dead tired and had things on her mind — the wild storm last night.

“Thonder!” she thundered. “It opened up me hud!”

We were walking upstairs under a large motto — FOR GOD SO LOVED THE WORLD, and so forth.

“It gave me huddicks!”

The house was full of furniture, and how many floors? Four or five anyway, and pianos on some of them, and there was an ottoman, and a wing chair, and pokerwork scenes from the Old Testament, Noah possibly, and was that Abraham and Isaac? The whole house was dark and varnished and gleaming — the smell of varnish still powerful, with the sizzle of a coal fire. It was June in Northern Ireland, so only one room had a fire trembling in the grate.

“And it went through me neighbor’s roof,” she said, still talking about the storm, the thunder and lightning.

Another flight of stairs, heavy carpet, more Bible mottoes, an armchair on the landing.

“Just one more,” Mrs. Wheeney said. “This is how I get me exercise. Oh, it was turrible. One of me people was crying—”

Mirrors and antlers and more mottoes and wood paneling, and now I noticed that Mrs. Wheeney had a mustache. She was talking about the reeyun — how hard it was; about breakfast at eeyut — but she would be up at sux; and what a dangerous suttee Belfast was.

CHRIST JESUS CAME INTO THE WORLD TO SAVE SINNERS was the motto over my bedstead, in this enormous drafty room, and the bed was a great slumping trampoline. Mrs. Wheeney was saying that she had not slept a wink all the previous night. It was the thunder and the poor soul in number eight, who was scared to death.

“It’s funny how tired you get when you miss a night’s sleep.” she said. “Now me, I’m looking forward to going to bed. Don’t worry about the money. You can give me the five pounds tomorrow.”

The rain had started again and was hitting the window with a swish like sleet. It was like being among the Jumblies, on a dark and rainy coast. They were glad to see aliens here, and I was happy among these strangers.

Belfast

I KNEW AT ONCE THAT BELFAST WAS AN AWFUL CITY. IT HAD A bad face — moldering buildings, tough-looking people, a visible smell, too many fences. Every building that was worth blowing up was guarded by a man with a metal detector who frisked people entering and checked their bags. It happened everywhere, even at dingy entrances, at buildings that were not worth blowing up, and, again and again, at the bus station, the railway station. Like the bombs themselves, the routine was frightening, then fascinating, then maddening, and then a bore — but it went on and became a part of the great waste motion of Ulster life. And security looked like parody, because the whole place was already scorched and broken with bomb blasts.

It was so awful I wanted to stay. It was a city that was so demented and sick that some aliens mistook its desperate frenzy for a sign of health, never knowing it was a death agony. It had always been a hated city. “There is no aristocracy — no culture — no grace — no leisure worthy of the name,” Sean O’Faolain wrote in his Irish Journey. “It all boils down to mixed grills, double whiskies, dividends, movies, and these strolling, homeless, hate-driven poor.” But if what people said was true, that it really was one of the nastiest cities in the world, surely then it was worth spending some time in, for horror interest?

I lingered a few days, marveling at its decrepitude, and then vowed to come back the following week. I had never seen anything like it. There was a high steel fence around the city center, and that part of Belfast was intact, because to enter it, one had to pass through a checkpoint — a turnstile for people, a barrier for cars and buses. More metal detectors, bag searches, and questions: lines of people waited to be examined so that they could shop, play bingo, or go to a movie.

Giant’s Causeway

I BEGAN TO DEVELOP A HABIT OF ASKING DIRECTIONS, FOR THE pleasure of listening to them.

“Just a munnut,” a man in Bushmills said. His name was Emmett; he was about sixty-odd and wore an old coat. He had a pound of bacon in his hand, and pressing the bacon to the side of his head in a reflective way, he went on.

“Der’s a wee wudden brudge under the car park. And der’s a bug one farder on — a brudge for trums. Aw, der used to be trums up and down! Aw, but they is sore on money and unded it. Lussun, ye kyan poss along da strond if the tide is dine. But walk on da odder side whar der’s graws.” He moved the bacon to his cheek. “But it might be weyat!”

“What might be wet?”

“Da graws,” Mr. Emmett said.

“Long grass?”

“In its notral styat.”

This baffled me for a while — notral styat — and then I thought: Of course, in its natural state!

Kicking through bracken, I pushed on and decided to head for the Giant’s Causeway.

BOSWELL: Is not the Giant’s Causeway worth seeing?

JOHNSON: Worth seeing? Yes; but not worth going to see.

I stayed on the coastal cliffs and then took a shortcut behind a coastal cottage, where I was startled by a big square-faced dog. The hairy thing growled at me and I leaped to get away, but I tripped and fell forward into a bed of nettles. My hands stung for six hours.

The Giant’s Causeway was a spectacular set of headlands made of petrified boilings and natural columns and upright pipe-shaped rocks. Every crack and boulder and contour had a fanciful name. This massive coastal oddity had been caused by the cooling of lava when this part of Ireland had oozed during a period of vulcanism. I walked along it, to and from Dunseverick Castle—“once the home of a man who saw the Crucifixion” (supposed to be Conal Cearnach, a roving Irish wrestler who happened to be in a wrestling match in Jerusalem the day Christ was crucified).

The basalt cliffs were covered with black slugs and jackdaws, and at seven in the evening the sun broke through the clouds as powerfully as a sunrise, striping the sea in pink. It was very quiet. The wind had dropped. No insects, no cars, no planes — only a flock of sheep baaing in a meadow on a nearby hilltop. The coves and bays were crowded with diving gulls and fulmars, but the cliffs were so deep, they contained the birds’ squawks. The sun gleamed on the still sea, and in the west above Inishowen Head I could spy the blue heights of Crocknasmug. Yes, the Giant’s Causeway was worth going to see.

It had been a tourist attraction for hundreds of years. Every traveler to Britain had come here to size it up. There had been tram lines out to it, as Mr. Emmett had told me in Bushmills. But the troubles had put an end to this, and now the coast had regained a rough primeval look — just one stall selling postcards, where there had been throngs of noisy shops.

This landscape had shaped the Irish mind and influenced Irish beliefs. It was easy to see these headlands and believe in giants. And now with people too afraid to travel much, the landscape had become monumental once again in its emptiness.

In pagan Ireland cromlechs had been regarded as giants’ graves, and people looked closely at the land, never finding it neutral but always a worry or a reassurance. Hereabouts, there were caves that had been the homes of troglodytes. And it seemed to me that there was something in the present desolation that had made the landscape important again. So the Irish had been returned to themselves in this interval, and their fears restored to them, for how could they stand amid all this towering beauty and not feel puny?

The Future in Enniskillen

SOMEDAY ALL CITIES WILL LOOK LIKE THIS, I HAD THOUGHT in Belfast; and the same thought occurred to me in Derry and now in Enniskillen. The center of these places was a “control zone,” with an entrance and exit. All cars and all people were examined for weapons or bombs, and the tight security meant that inside the control zone life was fairly peaceful and the buildings generally undamaged. It was possible to control the flow of traffic and even to prevent too many people from entering. It was conceivable that this system would in time be adapted to cities that were otherwise uncontrollable. It was not hard to imagine Manhattan Island as one large control zone, with various entrances and exits; Ulster suggested to me the likely eventuality of sealed cities in the future.

In Enniskillen each car in the control zone was required to have at least one person in it. If a car was left empty or unattended, a warning siren was sounded and the town center cleared. If the driver was found, he was given a stiff fine; if no driver claimed the car, the bomb squad moved in. This system had greatly reduced the number of car bombs in Enniskillen (only ten miles from the border). The last car bomb had gone off two years ago. The nicer part of Church Street was blown to smithereens — an appropriate Gaelic word — but it was a pardonable lapse, the soldiers said. That wired-up car seemed to have a person in it: how were they to recognize the difference between an Ulsterman and a dummy?

Willie McComiskey, who described himself as a fruiterer, told me that Enniskillen had been pretty quiet lately — no bombs, not many fires, only a few ambushed cars.

“What they do, see, is they go to isolated farms near the border. They take the farmer and stand him up and shoot him.”

He seemed rather emotionless as he spoke, and he described how the men were sometimes murdered in front of their families — the wife and children watching.

I asked him how he felt about it.

He said in the same even voice, “Why, you wouldn’t do it to a dog.”

“So what do you think of these gunmen?”

“I hate them,” he said. He began to smile. What absurd questions I was asking! But he was uncomfortable stating the obvious. Here, such attitudes were taken for granted.

He said, “We’re eighty percent British here. We couldn’t have union with southern Ireland. A Protestant would have no chance. He wouldn’t get a job.”

So McComiskey was a Protestant; that was his emphasis.

“But I don’t think the IRA want union now. They don’t know what they do want.”

From Enniskillen I walked south to Upper Lough Erne, one of the two enormous lakes here in County Fermanagh. The sun came out as I walked, and a milkman I met said, “The weather’s being kind to us.” There was no sound on these country lanes except the odd squawk of a crow. I found a hotel near the village of Bellanaleck, and now the sun was shining on the green woods and the lake. It was a sixty-room hotel. I thought I was the only guest, but the next day at breakfast I saw two Frenchmen in rubber waders — fishermen.

“I have to check you for bombs,” Alice, the room girl, said.

She followed me to my room and then peered uneasily into my knapsack.

“I’m not sure what a bomb looks like,” she said.

“You won’t find one in there,” I said. “It’s just old clothes—”

“And books,” she said. “And letters.”

“No letter bombs.”

She said, “I have to check all the same.”

I went for a walk. This was deep country. The pair of lakes went halfway across this part of Ulster. People spent weeks on cabin cruisers; Germans mostly. There were no English tourists here anymore.

“The English started to believe what they saw on television,” Bob Ewart said. “They actually thought all that stuff about bombs and murders was true!”

He himself was from Nottingham.

“I’ve lived here fourteen years and I’ve yet to see an angry man.”

That night the movie on television was Invasion of the Body Snatchers. I watched it with the Irish hotel workers. It was a horror movie about the world being taken over by alien germs. The Irishmen said it was frightening and of course went to bed happy. Then it struck me that a horror movie could enjoy a great popular success only if its frights were preposterous — like someone saying “Boo!” The ultimate horror was really what was happening in many Ulster towns: bombs, murders, people’s hands being hacksawed off, or men having their kneecaps shot off as a punishment for disloyalty, or the tar-and-feathering of young girls for socializing with soldiers. Because this was the truth — unlike the Hollywood monster movie — it was worse than frightening: it was unbearable.

And the next day a man named Guilfoyle told me there was quite a bit of rural crime in the border areas — cattle maiming. I had no idea what he was talking about. He explained that to take revenge on farmers, some of the republican country folk sneaked into the pastures at night and knifed off the cows’ udders.

Mooney’s Hotel

IN BELFAST I STAYED IN A DIRTY HOTEL WITH A DAMP INTERIOR and wallpaper that smelled of tobacco smoke and beer and the breakfast grease. But there was no security check here. I had been searched in Enniskillen, a town that hadn’t had a bomb in years; and I would have been searched at the grand Europa Hotel in Belfast — it was surrounded by a high barbed-wire fence and had sentries and guard dogs. The tourists and journalists stayed at the Europa — it was a good target for bombs. But no one of any importance stayed at Mooney’s Hotel.

I called it Mooney’s because it greatly resembled Mrs. Mooney’s flophouse in James Joyce’s story “The Boarding House.” Our Mrs. Mooney also had an enormous florid face and fat arms and red hands, and she catered to traveling salesmen and drifters. The carpets were ragged, the wallpaper was peeling, there were nicks all over the woodwork. But I was free there, and I would not have been free in an expensive hotel; and I also thought that in this grubby place I was out of danger. It was Belfast logic, but it was also a pattern of life that I was sure would become more common in the cities of the future.

The bar at Mooney’s was busy all night, filling the whole building with smoke and chatter.

“What time does the bar close?” I asked on my first night.

“October,” a drinker told me, and laughed.

No one admitted to breaking the law in Ulster. The most they said was “Look what they make us do!” It was as if all the street violence were imaginary or else rigged by soldiers who (so it was said in Derry) coaxed children into starting riots. It was slippery, shadowy, tribal; it was all stealth. It was a folk tradition of flag waving and the most petty expression of religious bigotry west of Jerusalem: the Linfield Football Club of Belfast had a clause in its constitution stipulating that no Catholic could ever play on its team. Apart from the bombing, it was not a public crime anymore. It was sneaking ambushes and doorstep murders (“I’ve got something for your father”) and land mines in the country lanes. Some of the worst crimes took place in the prettiest rural places — the shootings and house burnings and the cattle maiming — in the green hills, with the birds singing.

People said, “There’s no solution.… Ireland’s always had troubles.… Maybe it’ll die out.… I suppose we could emigrate.…”

I kept thinking: This is Britain!

It was like being shut in with a quarreling family and listening to cries of “You started it!” and “He hit me!” And I felt about Ulster as I had felt about some south coast boardinghouses on rainy days — I wanted to tiptoe to the front door and leave quietly and keep walking.

But I was grateful, too. No one had imposed on me. I had done nothing but ask questions, and I had always received interesting answers. I had met hospitable and decent people. No one had ever asked me what I did for a living. Perhaps this was tact: it was an impolite question in a place where so many people were on the dole.

I had been asked the question in England and Wales. “I’m in publishing,” I always said. Publishing was respectable, harmless, and undiscussable. The conversation moved on to other matters, “I’m a writer” was a fatal admission, and certainly one of the great conversation stoppers. Anyway, with me in wet shoes and scratched leather jacket and bruised knapsack, would anyone have believed I was a writer? But no one knew what publishers looked like.

On my last night in Belfast, I was asked. I was at Mooney’s talking to Mr. Doran, and I had asked too many questions about his upbringing, his mother, his ambitions, the crime rate, his job—

“And what do you do?” Doran asked, risking the question no one else had dared.

Obviously I did something. I was an alien.

“I’m in publishing,” I said.

Doran’s face lit up. Not once in seven weeks of my saying this had anyone responded so brightly. But this was Ireland.

“I’m working on a wee novel,” Doran said, and ordered me another pint. “I’ve got about four hundred pages done — it’s right in me room upstairs. Let’s meet tomorrow and have another jar. I’ll bring me novel with me. You’ll love it. It’s all about the troubles.”

The next day I tiptoed past Doran’s room. I heard the flutterblast of his snoring. I slipped out of Mooney’s and shut the door on Ulster.

Cape Wrath

SOME FANTASIES PREPARE US FOR REALITY. THE SHARP STEEP Cuillins were like mountains from a storybook — they had a dramatic, fairy-tale strangeness. But Cape Wrath on the northwest coast of Scotland was unimaginable. It was one of those places where, I guessed, every traveler felt like a discoverer who was seeing it for the first time. There are not many such places in the world. I felt I had penetrated a fastness of mountains and moors, after two months of searching, and I had found something new. So even this old, overscrutinized kingdom had a secret patch of coast! I was very happy at Cape Wrath. I even liked its ambiguous name. I did not want to leave.

There were other people in the area: a hard-pressed set-dement of sheep farmers and fishermen, and a community of dropouts making pots and jewelry and quilts at the edge of Balnakeil. There were anglers and campers, too, and every so often a brown plane flew overhead and dropped bombs on one of the Cape Wrath beaches, where the army had a firing range. But the size of the place easily absorbed these people. They were lost in it, and as with all people in a special place, they were secretive and a little suspicious of strangers.

Only the real natives were friendly. They were the toughest Highlanders and they did not match any Scottish stereotype I knew. They did not even have a recognizably Scottish accent. They were like white crows. They were courteous, hospitable, hard-working, and funny. They epitomized what was best in Scotland, the strong cultural pride that was separate from political nationalism. That took confidence. They were independent, too — thrawn was the Lowlands word for their stubborn character. I admired their sense of equality, their disregard for class, and the gentle way they treated their children and animals. They were tolerant and reliable, and none of this was related to the flummery of bagpipes and sporrans and tribalistic blood-and-thunder that Sir Walter Scott had turned into the Highland cult. What I liked most about them was that they were self-sufficient. They were the only people I had seen on the whole coast who were looking after themselves.

It was a shire full of mountains, with spaces between — some valleys and some moors — and each mountain was separate. To describe the landscape it was necessary to describe each mountain, because each one was unique. But the soil was not very good, the sheep were small, the grass thin, and I never walked very far without finding a corpse — loose wool blowing around bones, and the bared teeth of a skull.

“Look,” a shepherd named Stephen said to me on one of these hillsides.

A buzzard-sized bird was circling.

“It’s a hooded crow,” Stephen said. “They’re desperate creatures. In a place like this — no shelter, no one around for miles — they find a lamb and peck its eyes out. It’s lost, it can’t get to its mother, it gets weak. Then the hooded crows — so patient up there — dive low and peck it to pieces. They’re a terrible bird.”

He said that it was the predatory crows, not the weather, that killed the lambs. It was a cold place, but not excessively so. In winter there was little snow, though the winds were strong and the easterlies were usually freezing gales. There were always birds in the wind — crows and hawks and comic squawking oystercatchers with long orange bills and singing larks and long-necked shags and stuttering stonechats.

It could be an eerie landscape, especially on a wet day, with all the scattered bones gleaming against the dun-colored cliffs and the wind scraping against the heather. It surprised me that I was happy in a place where there were so few trees — there were none at all here. It was not picturesque and it was practically unphotographable. It was stunningly empty. It looked like a corner of another planet, and at times it seemed diabolical. But I liked it for all these reasons. And more important than these, my chief reason for being happy was that I felt safe here. The landscape was like a fierce-looking monster that offered me protection; being in Cape Wrath was like having a pet dragon.

Royal Visit

I TRIED TO HITCHHIKE IN ORDER TO GET TO ANSTRUTHER IN time to see the Queen, but no one picked me up. I fell in with a farm laborer on the road. He was coming from St. Andrews. He had gone there for the Royal Visit.

“I saw the Queen,” he said, and he winced, remembering.

“How did she look?”

He winced again. His name was Dougie. He wore rubber boots. He said, “She were deep in thought.”

Dougie had seen something no one else had.

“She were preoccupied. Her face were gray. She weren’t happy.”

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

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

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

I said, “Being Queen of England has its compensations.”

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

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

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

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

“Aye. She’s having lunch there,” the driver said.

I wondered where.

The driver knew. “At the Craw’s Nest. It’s a small hotel on the Pittenweem Road.”

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

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

“She’s just left,” one said. His name was Hector Hay McKaye.

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

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

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

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

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

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

In the lobby they were selling souvenirs of the Royal Visit. How had they had time to prepare these paperweights and medallions and letter openers and postcards saying CRAW’S NEST HOTEL — SOUVENIR OF THE ROYAL VISIT?

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

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

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

The cleaning ladies were buzzing early the next morning.

“I couldn’t believe it,” Mrs. Ross said. “It didn’t seem real. It was like a dream.”

I said, “What will Willie Hamilton think?”

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

“Willie Hamilton can get stuffed.”

Trippers

ROSALIE AND HUGH MUTTON COLLECTED PRESERVED RAILWAYS. They had been on the Romney, Hythe, and Dym-church; the Ravenglass; all the Welsh lines; and more. They loved steam. They would drive hundreds of miles in their Ford Escort to take a steam train. They were members of a steam railway preservation society. This North Norfolk Railway reminded them of the line in Shepton Mallet.

Then Mrs. Mutton said, “Where’s your casual top?”

“I don’t have a casual top in brown, do I,” Mr. Mutton said.

“Why are you wearing brown?”

Mr. Mutton said, “I can’t wear blue all the time, can I.”

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

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

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

This was the only train in Britain today, the fifteen-minute ride from Weybourne. It was sunny in Sheringham — a thousand people on the sandy beach, but only two people in the water. Because of the railway strike all these trippers had come by car.

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

“I should have worn my blooming hat.”

“The air’s fresh, but it’s making my eyes water.”

“We can look round Woolworth’s after we’ve had our tea.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Hands up, all those who aren’t working,” one comedian said.

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

The comedian was already laughing. “Have some Beecham Pills,” he said. “They’ll get you ‘working’ again!”

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

Let him go, let him tarry,

Let him sink, or let him swim.

He doesn’t care for me

And I don’t care for him.

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

“We used to put manure on our rhubarb.”

“We used to put custard on ours!”

No one laughed.

“Got any matches?”

“Yes, and they’re good British ones.”

“How do you know?”

“Because they’re all strikers!”

A child in the first row began to cry.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We’ll gather lilacs in the spring agine,

And walk together down a shady line …

Typical

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 newsagent 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 funfair 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-chips shops, two were owned by Greeks and the third was always closed. The Chinese restaurant, Hong Kong Gardens, was always empty; FOOD TO TAKE AWAY, 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 trailer 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 Defense 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 discotheque 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 of 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.