The Kingdom by the Sea

by Paul Theroux

  Blackgang was associated with smugglers—few places on the British coast did not claim to be the haunts of wreckers or moon-cussers. The thievery was boasted about and romanticized until it seemed a kind of heroism. It did not have any taint of criminality, and the whole of the south coast had pockets vying with one another over whose smugglers were the darkest or most daring. The Smugglers' Inn was one of the commonest names for a bar on the coast. Smuggling was fun, smuggling was blameless, smuggling was British.

  There was a Fantasy Theme Park at Blackgang, with statues and murals and tableaux of smuggling; there were books about it and signs showing the way to smugglers' caves, and, of course, there were inns and public houses associated with this activity.

  "Look, Ron," Penny Battley said. She was on a Blue Sky Tour from Yorkshire. "Smooglers."

  The statues depicted cutthroats in black eyepatches, with tattoos on their arms, carrying casks of brandy.

  Daniel Defoe was near here in 1724. He wrote, "I do not find they have any foreign commerce, except it be what we call smuggling, and roguing; which I may say, is the reigning commerce of all this part of the English coast, from the mouth of the Thames to the Land's End to Cornwall." A hundred years later, Richard Ayton, in A Journey Around Great Britain, wrote how he would fall into conversation with men on the coast and then, after talking about fishing, they "reverted with pride to those days when a little honest smuggling cheered a man's heart ... with a drop of unadulterated gin. 'But these are cruel times,' they observed, 'and the Lord only knows what we shall be obliged to give up next.'"

  Where there was smuggling, there was usually the plundering of wrecks, another piece of thievery that was regarded as having simple manly virtues and needing no more justification than the theory of finders-keepers. When wrecks were few, ships were lured onto rocks with false lights, and then the wreckers, village hearties, would swarm from the coast and pick them clean. Ayton met these men, too. He wrote, "Amongst themselves, a man who had robbed a vessel of property to the amount of fifty pounds might pass for a very honest fellow; but if he were known to have stolen a pocket handkerchief on shore, he would be shunned as a thief. They talk of a good wreck-season as they do a good mackerel season, and thank Providence for both."

  I grew a little tired of being asked to enjoy the romance of smuggling. Like smugglers today, they were vicious cheats and bullies, who sneaked at night and squealed when they were caught. I could not see them as harmless, and at the very least they were grubby and mendacious. But they were praised for their recklessness and their courage. Meanwhile, back at the South Goodwin lightship and on the Sussex coast and throughout the tight bays and coves of south Cornwall, men were still smuggling for a living. Illegal immigrants, seasick Pakistanis, and puking Bangladeshis were being sneaked ashore near Deal, and cigarettes into Broadstairs, and bootleg brandy into Cornwall from Brittany, "but don't tell anyone I told you," my source, Arthur Tulley, said.

  It was twenty miles from Ventnor to Freshwater Bay, but it was an empty path. The fields were open and very wide, and the long hills had views for miles, so that approaching I could see the high wind from the Channel giving the wheat the look of a riptide, and, when it lessened to a breeze, silken currents were stirred in the tassels.

  I walked to Freshwater Bay and kept walking, across Tennyson Down (the poet once lived nearby and so had the photographer Julia Margaret Cameron) to Needle Down and West High Down, the westernmost point of the Isle of Wight. There, a series of chalk columns rose out of the sea and were known to sailors as the Needles. There were parts of those downs which were nearly five hundred feet high, and I could easily see the sun setting behind Swanage, seventeen miles away. Then I walked back to Freshwater Bay, and there I stayed the night.

  "I work about ten hours a day," Daphne Wrennell said at the Albion Hotel, "and I get an hour off in the morning and about three hours in the afternoon. Wednesdays are free. I'm from Wales—me mum's Welsh—we're all from somewhere different here at the Albion. I've been coming back here every year for the past four years to work. It's quite nice, really. I know it's not a real job, but you get two months off a year when the hotel's closed—no, we don't get paid for that. That's in the winter. I have a bit of rest then. I was thinking of doing some traveling next winter. I might go to Turkey. I always fancied Turkey. I got some brochures—it's not very expensive, is it? I was thinking of going alone. Think I should?"

  I urged her to take a friend and gave her the usual cautions.

  The sun was shining the next morning, so I decided to walk the back roads to Yarmouth. It seemed to me that there was little traffic on the island, but that the roads were so crooked and narrow the few cars were often held up, and the buses were so large they went slowly, causing obstructions. I was told that it was possible to whip around the island in an hour and a half, but that the buses prevented this.

  "In my youth, we used to call those 'sharabangs,'" a man told me. We had stopped to watch a bus that had become jammed against a curve in order to let a horse and buggy go past. Querying faces with white noses and eyeglasses appeared at the windows of the bus.

  "Sharabangs," the man repeated. This was Francis Pitchford, an accountant from Surrey. He had a cottage here and would be retiring to it soon. As I listened to him on the road that morning, it struck me that many people who appeared to be reminiscing were actually gloating or boasting, or even lying.

  "I can remember," Mr. Pitchford said, "the two-tier buses, very big ones, drawn by horses. Now that shows you how old I am."

  But he was not very old, certainly not much over sixty—and that was nothing to boast about. I did not believe him, but I kept my mouth shut, and I let him say, "Oh, this was way before your time, young fellow."

  There was a kind of hostility in this, something like I've been here longer than you, a very English way of putting down a stranger, telling you that he was older than you were. I had heard Englishmen pretend to be older than they were in order to score a point. It was only the old in England who were allowed to be opinionated.

  He was still grinning at the stranded bus when I walked on.

  I saw a card in the window of a general store farther up the road. It said,

  Catholics—Remember These Words?

  IN NOMINE PATRIS ET FILII ET SPIRITU SANCTU...

  followed by holy mass, which until a few years ago could be heard in every Catholic church in the land.

  The same holy mass is still celebrated privately in Newport on the 3rd Sunday of the month.

  Telephone: Newport 4220

  It made the Latin mass seem like a secret ceremony, and indeed the tone of the note hinted at a clandestine service, calling up images of early Christians and whispered consecrations. I wondered if on the Isle of Wight there was not an old-style unreformed Catholicism taking hold, and I longed to know more. I found a public phonebox and dialed the number, but I got no reply. It was perhaps an example of my aimlessness that I would gladly have changed my plans and walked to Newport to find out about the secret Catholics if I had been able to raise anyone with the phone call.

  The path through the woods to Yarmouth was straight and level; once it had been a railway line, and now it was a cinder track, used mostly by hackers. A large bird alighted on the path. I took out my binoculars and saw it was an English jay, Garrulus glandarius, large, beautifully colored, noisy, and very shy. It flew up suddenly, as if propelled by its harsh squawk. It had been startled by a young woman coming down the path toward me.

  I knew she would be frightened of me. Two women had been murdered ("savagely") in some woods near Aldershot the day before. It had been reported by the papers and on the television news. These days everyone watched the news, because of the Falklands War, so there was an unusual consciousness of public events. It was not explained what "savagely" meant, but anyone could guess: a razor or a knife, probably; and the woman-hating slasher was almost certainly a solitary man with a plausible face, wearing old clothes, his weapon in his knapsack,
and oily hiker's shoes on his feet—very likely a man like me, on a path like this.

  She saw me and froze. I wanted to go another way, but there was a marsh beside the path, so I had to stick to this route and walk right past her. I tried to be jaunty, but that brought a look of terror to her face. She looked away, but there was an intensity in her alert movements that was like panic—she was not breathing; she was listening. She was about twenty-two and her fear had made her features very plain. I wanted to say: It's not me!

  I said, "Good morning," as I passed her.

  She mumbled something in a frightened voice. I felt sorry for her, and did her the favor of hurrying away. I looked back: she was running down the path toward Freshwater.

  Yarmouth was a fine place, very small and solid, made of large stones the damp had turned green on the low pretty buildings, with proud streets and a little compact ruin of a castle ("The Arbella sailed from Yarmouth for Massachusetts in 1630"). It was a very private town on a cozy harbor and it had a long slender pier. It was an ancient place, almost as old as the island itself; it faced north. The ferry was just about to leave, so I jumped aboard.

  It was here, on the Solent, that Tennyson wrote "Crossing the Bar," but in the morning it was hard to imagine "Sunset and evening star, / And one clear call for me!" and the poet recommending his soul to Heaven. The sun was sparkling on the water behind the yachts tipping toward Yarmouth—a Force Eight was blowing, and I could see the collapsed Hurst Castle to the west, jutting on a spit of land from Hampshire, its arches like a set of broken dentures. There was a lovely lighthouse beside it, a white pawn on the water.

  In this way I left the Isle of Wight and sailed on the ferry to Lymington, with its clusters of masts and the grass growing around the harbor. It reminded me of a Cape Cod town, a village on the sea, like Barnstable or Sandwich. It had a little round harbor, and the train went right down to the pier, where the ferry docked.

  Traveling to Brockenhurst from Lymington—only five of us boarded this little train: its days were numbered, surely—I thought how easy it was for me to travel around Britain. When the path ran out there were trains or buses, and they left on time. This reflection was prompted by the arrival of the train immediately after the ferry docked in this fairly insignificant place. Money was easy—I could use personal checks or get money at any bank, even in a village such as Lymington. People were generally efficient and helpful, and some were friendly; everyone spoke English; I was never in danger; it was impossible for me to get lost. Was it any wonder that England was the most widely explored country on earth? In a sense, nothing was unknown in England—it was just variously interpreted.

  But I knew that I needed this ease—the language, the money, the safety—because it was the subtlest culture on earth to explain. The English found foreigners funny because foreigners weren't English, and because it was impossible for anyone to become English. To an American, this attitude was itself funny and puzzling. But even after eleven years of groping for explanations, I was still groping, and on the coast I was in unfamiliar places. What a relief that everything worked so well and I was never afraid!

  We were at the edge of the New Forest, and the heather and gorse and its flatness gave it the look of a moor. The wild ponies were not much higher than the new ferns ("Adders and lizards are not uncommon"). At Brockenhurst, a convenient railway junction because it was in the middle of nowhere, I changed for the Bournemouth train. The train did not hurtle toward Bournemouth, but rather dawdled pleasantly—at the pretty village of Sway, with an old-style railway platform that, in this spring heat, looked like a setting for the opening of a story by Saki; at Hinton Admiral, which sounded like the name of a butterfly or a dahlia, and was as lovely as its name; at Christchurch, after crossing the broad pastures and wheatfields; and Pokesdown, which was densely settled, a suburb of Bournemouth, the next stop. I got out at Central Station and walked to the Front.

  The chines, or ridges, of Bournemouth supported row upon row of hotels and guest houses. Bournemouth's good weather—the best in Britain—had turned it into a resort, with pretty parks and ugly buildings, bistros and discos. It looked like a country town that became a city too quickly, but though it wore its newness awkwardly, it had enough parks and promenades to justify its reputation for being a stroller's city. It was, heart and soul, a seaside resort, and so inevitably full of shufflers and people staring and vaguely smiling. And all those hotels—thousands, it seemed, on the toast-colored crumbling cliffs. It did not have the tone of Eastbourne, which it resembled in some ways, but it was undeniably prosperous. It was crowded, and yet its heights and the winding streets of its hills made it bearable. Viewed from West Cliff it looked the epitome of a south coast resort, occupying about fifteen miles of shoreline. Bournemouth was also famous for its golf courses. Golf was a coastal sport, not to say passion, but that was not so surprising, since "links" was an old word that described the kind of sandy and turfy seashore we associate with a golf course.

  People sat silently in cars, eating bananas, chewing sandwiches, and reading the gutter press: argies lose two! was the headline today—two planes or two ships. All the headlines exulted when Argentina suffered casualties, but British losses were somewhat understated, and most of the time it was reported in the language of British sports reporting. It was sunny but windy on the Front at Bournemouth, and people were variously dressed. I saw Ivy in her old overcoat and gloves and woolly scarf walking past Susan, supine in her bikini. Russell was a black boy with red hair and four earrings in each ear and a futile and obscure tattoo on his dusky arm; he was shadowing Kim, fifteen years old, with Billy very clearly tattooed on the side of her neck. The retired and the unemployed, the very old and the very young—Bournemouth had them in common with all the other seaside places I had seen. Middle-aged people wearing knapsacks were rather rare, which was perhaps the reason I received so many stares.

  I lingered at the shallys to look inside and examine the furnishings (here a toaster, there a potted plant). It was too windy to read the newspaper outside. Most of the shally people were drinking tea, and some were sunbathing with all their clothes on, their hands stuck in their pockets and their faces pinched at the glaring sun.

  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 Darbeyfield, 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 bala
nce 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."