The Kingdom by the Sea

by Paul Theroux

  Broadstairs was full of flesh-colored flowers. There were no Skinheads here, no Nazi slogans, no signs saying anarchy!—that was always a popular one in public toilets in England. There were about thirty Mods drinking cider on the Front, passing half-gallon bottles back and forth. These boys had removed their jackets and crash helmets and shirts, and they sat in the sun on the green park benches. There was no loud music, no honky-tonk at Broadstairs; the Front was genteel—the iron ornateness of Victorian porches.

  "Charles Dickens lived in this house," the sign said on a brick house with a brick turret that was smack on the coastal path at the edge of Broadstairs. Dickens had said that Broadstairs beat "all watering-places into what the Americans call 'sky-blue fits.'" This residence had been given the name Bleak House, and in its gift shop it was possible to buy potholders and tea towels and key chains stamped Bleak House—Broadstairs. Upstairs, the novelist's desk and wash basin were on view and could be seen for a small charge. It was of particular interest to me that Dickens had written most of American Notes in this house. He sat at this desk and looked out that window and dipped this pen in that inkpot and wrote, "To represent me as viewing America with ill-nature, coldness or animosity, is merely to do a very foolish thing, which is always a very easy one."

  There was a fortuneteller's shop on the Front at Broadstairs, with a sign saying OLANDAH CLAIRVOYANTE. She was said to be the wisest woman in Europe. A testimonial letter taped onto her window said, "Dear Olondo, Whenever I feel depressed, which is every day, I take your letter out and read it and feel so much better—"

  Which is every day? I went into the shop. Olandah was seated behind a curtain. She wore a scarf on her head and what looked like stage make-up and beads. Her expression was full of weary suspicion and she stared with such seriousness, I thought she had terrible news for me.

  She said, "Do you want a reading?"

  I said yes. She took my hand loosely, as if weighing it to bite. She said I was far from home—had my knapsack and muddy shoes given her a clue? She said I was doing a very difficult thing, but if she was referring to traveling around Britain, perhaps she knew something I didn't, because I had not foreseen any difficulties. She said I was sensitive and artistic: perhaps a painter? "Couldn't draw a rabbit," I said. She said I was successful but that I tried to hide it. I was often in the company of strangers. Some of them would try to take advantage of me, but my character would overcome them.

  All this she gathered by prodding the palm of my right hand and tracing her crimson fingernails on the lines I got from rowing a skiff in Cape Cod Bay.

  "Do you see anything there about Northern Ireland?"

  "Distant lands certainly. One of them might be Ulster."

  "Do I survive in the end?"

  "Oh, yes. You lead a healthy life. You are not a smoker, for example."

  "Gave up a year ago. Pipe. I used to inhale it. I miss it sometimes like a dead friend."

  "You have many friends," Olandah said, perhaps mishearing me. "But you tend to keep away from them. You keep yourself to yourself. You are very independent."

  "Self-employed," I said. "One last query. Where am I going to sleep tonight?"

  She stopped looking at my hand. She looked at my nose and said, "Not at home."

  "What town—can you give me a hint?"

  "I give character readings," Olandah said. "I don't give tourist information."

  This cost me £7, which was about a pound more than it would have cost me to stay at a guest house, with bed and breakfast. Still, I was grateful for her encouragement and glad to have been reassured that I was going to survive.

  Another sign in Broadstairs said, "Seven miles out to sea from this point lay the dreaded Goodwin Sands—the great ship swallower—considered by a great many seafarers to be the most dangerous stretch of water in the world." There were countless stories about the disasters and wrecks on the Goodwins. "Their ingurgitating property is such, that a vessel of the largest size, driven upon them, would in a few days be swallowed up and seen no more." What was not so well known was that at the turn of the century, at low water, the sands became very firm and cricket matches were played on them.

  I passed the bundled-up old people on their benches, and the families with picnic baskets and balloons, the day-trippers waiting at the JUGS OF TEA FOR THE BEACH sign, and I walked out of Broadstairs and through a gate to a narrow park dedicated to the memory of George VI. The land was higher here, and on this sea cliff were magpies and dog-owners and kite-flyers. Down below were the original thirty-nine steps, leading to the sea.

  On the other side of this park was Ramsgate.

  The man on the train to Margate, Mr. Mould, had seemed to me to be boasting when he told me he was going to Ramsgate. Anyway, these towns on the Kent coast a few hours from London were either described as Cockneyfied or not very Cockneyfied—the less of it the better, people said, since London influence on the coast was always seen as contamination. The coast represented an escape from every terrestrial ill. The worst was metropolitan oppression, and London was the epitome of that. When Baedeker described Ramsgate as "a somewhat less Cockneyfied edition of Margate," it intended praise. That was in 1906, but even today such places were still measured by London, because London was the future and it was also pretty poisonous. When a coastal place was too big or too noisy or full of traffic—when it was inconvenient or ugly or it smelled—people said, "Just like London," in a helpless way, because now they were beside the sea and they couldn't go any farther.

  Ramsgate was larger than but just as ugly as Margate, with a swimming pool on the Front that looked like a Roman ruin painted blue. It was the Marine Bathing Pool, which had been neglected and now lay vandalized and full of smashed chairs and broken glass. "The Council are at present discussing future development," the sign beside it said, but one could not read that without thinking of dynamite.

  I had been hurrying. My hamstrings ached. I asked a man in a flat cap where the railway station was. He was grateful to me for asking directions and offered me three different routes; the station was some distance away.

  His name was Len Shottery. He said, "Are you walking it?"

  I said yes.

  "It's much too far to walk," he said. "Get in—I'll drive you."

  Mr. Shottery climbed into the cab of his Department of Public Works truck. He had been out all day, putting out plastic cones to reroute traffic for tomorrow's ditch-digging. He said he was a Londoner. "I came down here five years ago and haven't been back once." He was about fifty years old and he said this with the air of a man who has fled to the South Pacific.

  "Watch them trains," Mr. Shottery said. "They're not very clever on a holiday."

  I took the train nine miles to Sandwich and walked around the town. It was hardly bigger than Sandwich, Massachusetts, but it was a lovely place surrounded by flat green fields. It had survived and was still pretty and old-fangled, because in the course of eight hundred years this coastal town had slipped inland and was no longer a great port. It had just closed up, and now it was preserved, two miles from the sea, in its own rich silt. "Queen Elizabeth visited the town in 1572, and the house is occupied in Strand Street," and there I saw a man with a frightened face walking a tottering dog.

  My idea was to walk to Deal, which was only five miles away. German prisoners of war had built the Sandwich-to-Deal road and cycle path, in 1946, before they were repatriated from their prison camp at Eythome. I wanted to hike this road, but my legs ached from my hurrying, so I took an evening train.

  I arrived in Deal in a glarey sunset. It was very quiet here, very empty, and I liked it for smelling of fish and seaweed. Everyone had gone home—into the house or back to London. The seafront was just rope and hauled-up fishing dinghies, and the wind was blowing along the stony shingly shore. Now the sea and the sky were blue. I sat down. The sun was like a carbuncle. I decided to stay.

  At no point in three months of travel did I have a reservation in advance at a hotel or a gues
t house. I wanted to come and go as I pleased and not be held to specific places and dates. I thought: If I can't get a room, I'll move on to another place and look—but that was never necessary. I never found a hotel that was full, though I found many that were completely empty. I was never turned away. Some of the hotel-owners or guest house proprietors were embarrassed by their empty rooms. Some said it was too early in the season. "We'll be packed in June," they said in May. But in June they said, "Things are quiet now, but it'll be a madhouse in July, when the school holidays start." In July they said, "In August we're always fully booked." But the season deepened, and they were nearly always empty. Some of the owners said that people had stopped traveling in Britain—they went to Spain when they went at all. Some said, "It's this recession. It's a worldwide problem." Some people said, "We're not a rich country anymore. We're poor"; but that attitude made me wary, because those were the people who always overcharged me.

  My method for finding a place to stay was to walk up and down the streets and look for a clean or well-shaped building that had a view of the sea. I avoided the new hotel (too expensive) or the place in which I heard music playing (too noisy) or the damp tumbledown inn with the swaybacked roof that was usually buried in a back lane (stinks and hard beds). The tall semi-hotel I found in Deal after roaming around for twenty minutes looked all right—it had lovely windows—but after I gained entrance I saw it was no good. It smelled of bacon and beer, and it was run by a fat dirty woman named Mrs. Sneath, who smoked in my face.

  "Cheapest single room I have is ten pounds," Mrs. Sneath said. "That's bed and full breakfast."

  "Your sign says the rooms start at seven pounds."

  "I don't have any left, do I," she said.

  "I'll take a ten-pound one."

  "With tax that's eleven pounds fifty," she said, writing out the bill, "in advance. Make your check out to M. Sneath. You were well away," she went on, speaking to another woman who was sitting lamely on a bar stool, with a small glass of lager.

  "I was drinking gin," this other woman said. Her name was Mrs. Feeley. She was Irish, and though she was speaking with Mrs. Sneath, she kept looking at me in a friendly way and seemed always to be on the verge of asking me where I was from, and then saying that she had wanted to go there her whole life.

  "I was on shorts," Mrs. Sneath said. "I thought that band were smashing, and all that food. Gillows did the catering. I stuffed myself with smoked salmon and those bits of ham rolled around the pineapple chunks with the toothpick through them. Rum don't give you a hangover, and I always drink lots of water. Don't gin make you cry?"

  "Only sometimes," Mrs. Feeley said.

  "I hadn't been to a wedding for ages," Mrs. Sneath said.

  "They don't get married as much as they used to. They just seem to live together until they get sick of each other." Mrs. Feeley smiled at me, but she was still addressing Mrs. Sneath. "We had a marvelous wedding, Jerry and me. I was paralytic. They don't do that anymore. It's the pill."

  Mrs. Sneath did not reply. She was staring at me and compressing her cigarette in her yellow lips. "You're in nineteen. Top of the stairs, last door on the right. The loo is down the hall. Breakfast's at nine."

  "I wanted to be away at eight," I said.

  "Bloody crack of dawn," she said.

  "I'm walking to Dover," I said.

  "Dover's lovely," Mrs. Feeley said in her friendly way. She was fleshy and full of encouragement. She said, "But it used to be much prettier than it is now."

  "Breakfast's at nine," Mrs. Sneath said and wrung the sweat from her palms by clutching her filthy shift. She blinked the smoke out of her eyes and gave me an Eskimo squint and said, "If I made exceptions I'd be doing breakfasts all the morning. It's a proper cooked breakfast, see, that's why I'm not cheap."

  She handed me a baton—a stick of wood with a key wired to it.

  "Nineteen. Top of the stairs."

  I walked through Deal that night. It was only a few streets, but they were pleasant streets, and on the Front I could hear the sea lifting the smooth stones on the beach and then draining through them with a swallowing sound. At a dark patch of seafront a girl and boy stopped me. "Hey." I thought they were going to ask me directions. They were each about eighteen years old. The girl said, "Give me forty-five pence, will you?"

  I could not imagine why she was asking me for this exact sum, which was about a dollar. I said no.

  "It's not much," she said. "It's nothing."

  They were neatly dressed and both of them were smoking cigarettes.

  "He's a poof," the girl said, and they both laughed.

  ***

  They sat in the dark watching television with still, blue faces. Mrs. Sneath and her husband, Will, and Mrs. Feeley and Jerry, and a deranged-looking drifter, named Yerby, and Mrs. Sneath's father, Charlie Wensum, from Skegness. "Skeggy," he called it. He loved the coast. Mr. Wensum was a man of perhaps seventy-five, though it was hard to say for certain in that dark room. His skin was blue from the television. I had the impression from their silence and the way they sat, with their feet up and squashing cushions, that they did this every night. A sign on the door said TV LOUNGE—RESIDENTS ONLY.

  The news was on. I could hear Yerby breathing hard. No one spoke. The screen showed a map of the Falklands, two small rags of land.

  Mrs. Sneath said, "What do you think of this Falklands business?"

  I said it seemed reasonable to fight for what was yours.

  "People say they can't see the point of it," Jerry Feeley said. "Can you see the point of it?"

  I said I didn't know anything except that so far it was a war without any casualties, and if it stayed that way it would be easier to reach an agreement with Argentina.

  "No casualties he says." This from Yerby.

  The news was terrible. An Argentine battleship had been sunk with twelve hundred men aboard. Most of the men were feared drowned. This ship was the General Belgrano and these were the first deaths of the war. This had been announced only a few minutes before I had entered the room.

  No one said anything for a while, perhaps out of a fear of saying the wrong thing. What was said in the moments after a tragic announcement was always remembered.

  But Mrs. Sneath was agitated. Her voice was guilty and defiant.

  "They say they're going to eat the sheep!"

  "Who's going to eat the sheep?" I asked.

  "The Argies—who else?" she said. "When they run out of food. When they haven't got anything left. That's not fair, eating the sheep. They have no right. The Falklands may belong to Argentina, but they're British sheep!"

  "Those poor men." It was Mrs. Feeley, speaking sadly.

  Jerry said, "They won't have a chance in that water."

  I was sitting on the sofa with Mr. Wensum. His feet were drawn up under him; he was seated cross-legged like an Indian fakir, staring with his blue face at the bad news on the blue television. Without any warning I felt a nudge, a hard poke against my arm, and there was still pressure on my elbow. I looked down quickly and saw that Mr. Wensum had put his foot on my arm. I found this a disgusting thing for him to do.

  "I can't see the telly!" he shouted, and showed me his bright false teeth, bluer than his face.

  I hated his feet so much, I left the room.

  ***

  There was no one else at breakfast. There were no other guests at the hotel. All the rooms were empty. The people watching television had been family and friends. So Mrs. Sneath had lied to me about the "residents" and not having a cheaper room and having to cook breakfast all morning. She was in the kitchen, smoking and coughing over the frying pan. She said if I stayed another night she might be able to find me a cheaper room.

  "Some other time," I said. "I'll be back."

  Never, I thought.

  "It's up to you," Mrs. Sneath said. "Dover's pricey. We're a lot cheaper here."

  Sure you are.

  She put my plate of bacon and eggs in front of me and went to another tab
le and smoked and drank her tea and read her Sun. The headline was sunk! It referred to the General Belgrano and the twelve hundred dead men. It was the first of many gloating headlines.

  ***

  Then I was out the door and free, breathing fresh air—it was lovely, walking away in the morning. I closed the door and left for good. Cheerio, they said. Mind how you go. And I was off, taking long strides, glad I didn't have to stay a minute longer. And when I got sick of the slimy salty breakfasts, I just got up and walked out the door before anyone else was awake, and let the cat out, and hurried for the first hundred yards, and then slowed down to a stroll when I realized that I would never have to go back. It was a liberating fantasy of running away from home.

  I had no one to wait for, no bus to catch, no tickets to buy, no appointments. And the next time I find out that a hotel is dirty and I don't like the people, I'll leave, I thought; I'll just push on and find a better one. I liked thinking that I was always making progress whenever I walked away. And if I had bad luck, it did not matter, because there was always something better farther up the line: a beach or cliffs or a famous town or woods, and sometimes just the weather was a pleasure, as I went clockwise around the coast.

  I was happy, going to places I had never been, that had only been names to me, or descriptions in books that had falsely fixed the place in my imagination. In Rural Rides, William Cobbett had said, "Deal is a most villainous place. It is full of filthy-looking people. Great desolation of abomination has been going on here ... Everything seems upon the perish..." And I had assumed it was like that, the judgment was so strongly expressed. But it was a small mild town, without a seawall or much of a beach, and few trees, and open to the breezes from France. It was raggedly respectable. The boats on shore looked practical—slow, clumsy, and made for one purpose; they had numbers but no names; rusty ironwork: fishing boats. Men still went out every day from this old trampled coast and its crowded houses, and they made a living at the hard work of catching fish.