by Bill Bryson
Hooton offered the world not only a mildly ridiculous name, but the dumpiest British Rail station I ever hope to sneeze in. The shack-like platform waiting-rooms were dripping wet, which didn’t matter a great deal as I was soaked already. With six others, I waited a small eternity for a train to Chester, where I changed to another for Llandudno.
The Llandudno train was gratifyingly empty, so I took a seat at a table for four, and contented myself with the thought that I would soon be in a nice hotel or guesthouse where I could have a hot bath followed by a generously apportioned dinner. I spent a little time watching the scenery, then pulled out my copy of Kingdom by the Sea to see if Paul Theroux had said anything about the vicinity that I might steal or modify to my own purposes. As always, I was amazed to find that as he rattled along these very tracks he was immersed in a lively conversation with his fellow passengers. How does he do it? Quite apart from the consideration that my carriage was nearly empty, I don’t know how you strike up conversations with strangers in Britain. In America, of course, it’s easy. You just offer a hand and say, ‘My name’s Bryson. How much money did you make last year?’ and the conversation never looks back from there.
But in England - or in this instance Wales - it’s so hard, or atleast it is for me. I’ve never had a train conversation that wasn’t disastrous or at least regretted. I either blurt the wrong thing (‘Excuse me, I can’t help notice the exceptional size of your nose’) or it turns out that the person whose companionship I’ve encouraged has a serious mental disorder that manifests itself in murmurings and prolonged helpless weeping, or is a sales rep for the Hoze-Blo Stucco Company who mistakes your polite interest for keenness and promises to drop by for an estimate the next time he’s in the Dales, or who wants to tell you all about his surgery for rectal cancer and then makes you guess where he keeps his colostomy bag (‘Give up? Look, it’s here under my arm. Go on, have a squeeze’) or is a recruiter for the Mormons or any of ten thousand other things I would sooner be spared. Over a long period of time it gradually dawned on me that the sort of person who will talk to you on a train is almost by definition the sort of person you don’t want to talk to on a train, so these days I mostly keep to myself and rely for conversational entertainment on books by more loquacious types like Jan Morris and Paul Theroux.
So there is a certain neat irony that as I was sitting there minding my own business some guy in a rustling anorak came by, spied the book, and cried, ‘Aha, that Thoreau chap!’ I looked up to find him taking a perch on a seat opposite me. He looked to be in his early sixties, with a shock of white hair and festive, lushly overgrown eyebrows that rose in pinnacles, like the tips of whipped meringue. They looked as if somebody had been lifting him up by grabbing hold of them. ‘Doesn’t know his trains, you know,’ he said.
‘Sorry?’ I answered warily.
‘Thoreau.’ He nodded at my book. ‘Doesn’t know his trains at all. Or if he does he keeps it to himself.’ He laughed heartily at this and enjoyed it so much that he said it again and then sat with his hands on his knees and smiling as if trying to remember the last time he and I had had this much fun together.
I gave an economical nod of acknowledgement for his quip and returned my attention to my book in a gesture that I hoped he would correctly interpret as an. invitation to fuck off. Instead, he reached across and pulled the book down with a crooked finger - an action I find deeply annoying at the best of times. ‘Do you know that book of his - Great Railway what’s-it? All across Asia. You know the one?’
I nodded.
‘Do you know that in that book he goes from Lahore to Islamabad on the Delhi Express and never once mentions the make of engine.’
I could see that I was expected to comment, so I said, ‘Oh?’
‘Never mentioned it. Can you imagine that? What use is a railway book if you don’t talk about the engines.’
‘You like trains then?’ I said and immediately wished I hadn’t.
The next thing I knew the book was on my lap and I was listening to the world’s most boring man. I didn’t actually much listen to what he said. I found myself riveted by his soaring eyebrows and by the discovery that he had an equally rich crop of nose hairs. He seemed to have bathed them in Miracle-Gro. He wasn’t just a train-spotter, but a train-talker, a far more dangerous condition.
. ‘Now this train,’ he was saying, ‘is a Metro-Cammel self-sealed unit built at the Swindon works, at a guess I’d say between July 1986 and August, or at the very latest September, of ‘88. At first I thought it couldn’t be a Swindon 86-88 because of the cross-stitching on the seatbacks, but then I noticed the dimpled rivets on the side panels, and I thought to myself, I thought, What we have here, Cyril my old son, is a hybrid. There aren’t many certainties in this world but Metro-Cammel dimpled rivets never lie. So where’s your home?’
It took me a moment to realize that I had been asked a question. ‘Uh, Skipton,’ I said, only half lying.
‘You’ll have Crosse & Blackwell cross-cambers up there,’ he said or something similarly meaningless to me. ‘Now me, I live in Upton-on-Severn-’
‘The Severn bore,’ I said reflexively, but he missed my meaning.
‘That’s right. Runs right past the house.’ He looked at me with a hint of annoyance, as if I were trying to distract him from his principal thesis. ‘Now down there we have Z-46 Zanussi spin cycles with Abbott & Costello horizontal thrusters. You can always tell a Z-46 because they go patoosh-patoosh over seamed points rather than katoink-katoink. It’s a dead giveaway every time. I bet you didn’t know that.’
I ended up feeling sorry for him. His wife had died two years before - suicide, I would guess - and he had devoted himself since then to travelling the rail lines of Britain, counting rivets, noting breastplate numbers, and doing whatever else it is these poor people do to pass the time until God takes them away to a merciful death. I had recently read a newspaper article in which it wasreported that a speaker at the British Psychological Society had described train-spotting as a form of autism called Asperger’s syndrome.
He got off at Prestatyn - something to do with a Faggots & Gravy twelve-ton blender tender that was rumoured to be coming through in the morning - and I waved to him from the window as the train pulled out, then luxuriated in the sudden peace. I listened to the train rushing over the tracks - it sounded to me like it was saying Asperger’s syndrome Asperger’s syndrome - and passed the last forty minutes to Llandudno idly counting rivets.
CHAPTER TWENTY
FROM THE TRAIN, NORTH WALES LOOKED LIKE HOLIDAY HELL – ENDLESS ranks of prison-camp caravan parks standing in fields in the middle of a lonely, windbeaten nowhere, on the wrong side of the railway line and a merciless dual carriageway, with views over a boundless estuary of moist sand dotted with treacherous-looking sinkholes and, far off, a distant smear of sea. It seemed an odd type of holiday option to me, the idea of sleeping in a tin box in a lonesome field miles from anywhere in a climate like Britain’s and emerging each morning with hundreds of other people from identical tin boxes, crossing the rail line and dual carriageway and hiking over a desert of sinkholes in order to dip your toes in a distant sea full of Liverpool turds. I can’t put my finger on what exactly, but something about it didn’t appeal to me.
Then suddenly the caravan parks thinned, the landscape around Colwyn Bay took on a blush of beauty and grandeur, the train made a sharp jag north and minutes later we were in Llandudno.
It is truly a fine and handsome place, built on a generously proportioned bay and lined along its broad front with a huddle of prim but gracious nineteenth-century hotels that reminded me in the fading light of a line-up of Victorian nannies. Llandudno was purpose-built as a resort in the mid-1800s, and it cultivates a nice old-fashioned air. I don’t suppose that Lewis Carroll, who famously strolled this front with little Alice Liddell in the 1860s, telling her captivating stories of white rabbits and hookah-smoking caterpillars and asking between times if he could borrow her knickers
to wipe his fevered brow and possibly take a few innocuous snaps ofher in the altogether, would notice a great deal of change today, except of course that the hotels were now lit with electricity and Alice would be - what? - 127 years old and perhaps less of a distraction to a poor, perverted mathematician.
To my consternation, the town was packed with weekending pensioners. Coaches from all over were parked along the side-streets, every hotel I called at was full and in every dining room I could see crowds - veritable oceans - of nodding white heads spooning soup and conversing happily. Goodness knows what had brought them to the Welsh seaside at this bleak time of year.
Further on along the front there stood a clutch of guesthouses, large and virtually indistinguishable, and a few of them had vacancy signs perched in their windows. I had eight or ten to. choose from, which always puts me in a mild fret because I have an unerring instinct for choosing badly. My wife can survey a row of guesthouses and instantly identify the one run by a white-haired widow with a kindly disposition and a fondness for children, snowy sheets and sparkling bathroom porcelain, whereas I can generally count on choosing the one run by a guy with a grasping manner, a drooping fag and the sort of cough that makes you wonder where he puts the phlegm. Such, I felt gloomily certain, would be the case tonight.
All the guesthouses had boards out front listing their many amenities - ‘Colour TV’, ‘En Suite All Rooms’, ‘Hospitality Trays’, ‘Full CH’ - which only heightened my sense of unease and doom. How could I possibly choose intelligently among such a welter of options? One offered satellite TV and a trouser press and another boasted, in special jaunty italics, ‘Current Fire Certificate’ - something I had never thought to ask for in a B & B. It was so much easier in the days when the very most you could hope for was H 8c C in all rooms.
I selected a place that looked reasonable enough from the outside - its board promised a colour TV and coffee-making facilities, about all I require these days for a lively Saturday night - but from the moment I set foot in the door and drew in the mildewy pong of damp plaster and peeling wallpaper, I knew it was a bad choice. I was about to turn and flee when the proprietor emerged from a back room and stayed my retreat with an unenthusiastic ‘Yes?’ A short conversation revealed that a single room with breakfast could be had for £19.50 - little short of a swindle. It was entirely out of the question that I would stay the night in such a dismal place at such a larcenous price, so I said, ‘That sounds fine,’ and signed in. Well, it’s so hard to say no.
My room was everything I expected it to be - cold and cheerless, with melamine furniture, grubbily matted carpet and those mysterious ceiling stains that bring to mind a neglected corpse in the room above. Fingers of icy wind slipped through the single ill-fitting sash window. I drew the curtains and was not surprised that they had to be yanked violently before they would budge and came nowhere near meeting in the middle. There was a tray of coffee things but the cups were - let me be charitable - disgusting and the spoon was stuck to the tray. The bathroom, faintly illuminated by a distant light activated by a length of string, had curling floor tiles and years of accumulated muck packed into every corner and crevice. I peered at the yellowy grouting round the bath and sink and realized what the landlord did with his phlegm. A bath was out of the question, so I threw some cold water on my face, dried it with a towel that had the texture of a Weetabix and gladly took my leave.
I had a long stroll along the prom to boost my appetite and pass an hour. It felt wonderful. The air was still and sharp and there wasn’t a soul about, though there were still lots of white heads in the hotel lounges and dining rooms, all bobbing merrily about. Perhaps they were having a Parkinson’s convention. I walked nearly the length of The Parade, enjoying the chill autumn air and the trim handsomeness of the setting: a soft glow of hotels to the left, an inky void of restless sea to my right and a scattered twinkling of lights on the near and far headlands of Great and Little Ormes.
I couldn’t help notice - it seemed so obvious now - that nearly all the hotels and guesthouses looked markedly superior to mine. Almost without exception they had names that bore homage to other places - ‘Windermere’, ‘Stratford’, ‘Clovelly’, ‘Derby’, ‘St Kilda’, even Toronto’ - as if their owners feared that it would be too much of a shock to the system to remind visitors that they were in Wales. Only one place, with a sign that said ‘Gwely a BrecwastfRed and Breakfast’, gave any hint that I was, at least in a technical sense, abroad.
I dined simply at a small nondescript restaurant off Mostyn Street and afterwards, feeling disinclined to return to my dingy room in a state of stark sobriety, went hunting for a pub. Llandudno had surprisingly few of these vital institutions. I walked for some time before I found one that looked even vaguelyapproachable. It was a typical town pub inside - maroon-plush, stale-odoured, smoky - and it was busy, mostly with young people. I took a seat at the bar, thinking I might be able to eavesdrop on my neighbours and receive more immediate attention when my glass was empty, but neither of these was to be. There was too much music and background noise to discern what my neighbours were saying and too much clamour for service at a spot near the till for the single harried server to notice an empty glass and a beggarly face up at my end.
So I sat and drank beer when I could get some and instead watched, as I often do in these circumstances, the interesting process by which customers, upon finishing a pint, would present the barman with a glass of clinging suds and golden dribble, and that this would be carefully filled to slightly overflowing, so that the excess froth, charged with an invisible load of bacteria, spittle and micro-fragments of loosened food, would run down the side of the glass and into a slop tray, where it would be carefully -1 might almost say scientifically - conveyed by means of a clear plastic tube back to a barrel in the cellar. There these tiny impurities would drift and float and mingle, like flaky pooh in a goldfish bowl, awaiting summons back to someone else’s glass. If I am to drink dilute dribble and mouth rinsings, then I do rather wish I could do it in a situation of comfort and cheer, seated in a Windsor chair by a blazing fire, but this appears to be an increasingly elusive dream. As sometimes also happens in these circumstances, I had a sudden urge not to drink any more beer, so instead I hauled myself from my bar-side perch and returned to my seafront lodgings for an early night.
In the morning, I emerged from the guesthouse into a world drained of colour. The sky was low and heavy and the sea along the front vast, lifeless and grey. As I walked along, rain began to fall, dimpling the water. By the time I reached the station it was coming down steadily. Llandudno Station is closed on Sundays - that the largest resort in Wales has no Sunday rail services is too preposterous and depressing to elaborate on - but there was a bus to Blaenau Ffestiniog from the station forecourt at eleven. There was no bench or shelter by the bus-stop, nowhere to get out of the rain. If you travel much by public transport in Britain these days you soon come to feel like a member of some unwanted sub-class, like the handicapped or unemployed, and that everyone essentially wishes you would just go away. I felt a bit like that now - and I am rich and healthy and immensely good-looking. What must it be like to be permanently poor or disabled or otherwise unable to take a full and active part in the nation’s headlong rush for the sunny slopes of Mt Greedy?
It is remarkable to me how these matters have become so thoroughly inverted in the past twenty years. There used to be a kind of unspoken nobility about living in Britain. Just by existing, by going to work and paying your taxes, catching the occasional bus and being a generally decent if unexceptional soul, you felt as if you were contributing in some small way to the maintenance of a noble enterprise - a generally compassionate and well-meaning society with health care for all, decent public transport, intelligent television, universal social welfare and all the rest of it. I don’t know about you, but I always felt rather proud to be part of that, particularly as you didn’t actually have to do anything - you didn’t have to give blood or buy the Big Issu
e or otherwise go out of your way - to feel as if you were a small contributory part. But now, no matter what you do, you end up stung with guilt. Go for a ramble in the country and you are reminded that you are inexorably adding to congestion in the national parks and footpath erosion on fragile hills. Try to take a sleeper to Fort William or a train on the Settle-to-Carlisle line or a bus from Llandudno to Blaenau on a Sunday and you begin to feel shifty and aberrant because you know that these services require vast and costly subsidization. Go for a drive in your car, look for work, seek a place to live, and all you are doing is taking up valuable space and time. And as for needing health care - well, how thoughtless and selfish can you possibly be? (‘We can treat your ingrown toenails, Mr Smith, but it will of course mean taking a child off a life-support machine.’)
I dread to think how much it cost Gwynedd Transport to convey me to Blaenau Ffestiniog on this wet Sunday morning since I was the only customer, apart from a young lady who joined us at Betws-y-Coed and left us soon after at the interestingly named Pont-y-Pant. I had been looking forward to the journey for the chance to see a little of Snowdonia, but the rain was soon falling so hard, and the bus windows so beaded with dirty droplets, that I could see almost nothing - just blurry expanses of dead, rust-coloured ferns dotted here and there with motionless, seriously discontented-looking sheep. Rain pattered against the windows like thrown pebbles and the bus swayed alarmingly under gusts of wind. It was like being on a ship in rough seas. The bus lumbered with grinding reluctance up twisting mountain roads, itswindscreen wipers flapping wildly, to a plateau in the clouds and then embarked on a precipitate, seemingly out-of-control descent into Blaenau Ffestiniog through steep defiles covered with numberless slagheaps of broken, rain-shiny slate. This was once the heart of the Welsh slate-mining industry, and the scattered rejects and remnants, which covered virtually every inch of ground, gave the landscape an unearthly and eerie aspect like nothing else I had seen before in Britain. At the epicentre of this unearthliness squatted the village of Blaenau, itself a kind of slate slagheap, or so it seemed in the teeming rain.
