The Kingdom by the Sea

by Paul Theroux

  —Daily Telegraph (May 16, 1972)

  More recently, in what became known as "The Case of the Battered Budgie," a man was convicted in Bristol of causing unnecessary suffering to his pet budgerigar by placing it in a sink full of water. He was given a conditional discharge and ordered to pay £48 in witness costs. The witness was a Mr. John Bird. Mr. Bird "said that he saw the blue and white budgie called Sally, shivering with fright in George Brownless's ground floor flat." The case gained a certain notoriety, but at no point had anyone suggested that the prosecution of Mr. Brownless for excessively wetting his pet budgie was a waste of public money. Rather, there was a kind of comic self-congratulation: "You see how far we English are prepared to go in order to maintain our reputation for being eccentric and gentle?" But English animal-lovers could be violent, too. The Animal Liberation Front carried out destructive guerrilla raids on behalf of laboratory beagles and rabbits.

  I walked a little farther down the coast, and in a pub near Bridport I met a young man named Fuggle, who was twenty-four and who told me, "I once dyed my hair purple—aubergine, actually—and then I walked around. I wanted to call attention to myself. I mean, I wanted to stand out in a crowd. Funnily enough, no one seemed to care. Didn't take a blind bit of notice!"

  I said, "So your purple hair was a failure?"

  "You might say so," Fuggle said. Fuggle had an odd habit, but it was one I had seen in other people. Whenever he turned to look at me, he shut his eyes, and when he moved his head away, he opened them again. "Anyway, I put henna on my hair, and it all turned bright orange. A man said to me, 'What's that all about then?' And I said, 'Don't you see I'm trying to tell you something?'"

  "What were you trying to tell him?"

  "Obvious, isn't it?" Fuggle said.

  I said it was not obvious to me.

  Fuggle said, "I was trying to tell him I was different. I'm not like other blokes."

  "Because your hair was orange?" I said.

  "No, no, no," Fuggle said, facing me and shutting his eyes. "I mean different deep down. I'm just not like other blokes."

  "Give me an example," I said.

  "For example, I'm engaged to a girl. I don't know whether I'm going to marry her, but I'm engaged. She's four feet eight and I'm six feet two. She can't understand me. And for another example, I'm not jealous. I don't know what the word means. One night I wanted to go out for a drink. My best friend, Brian, was there. I said, 'I just want to go out alone, for a drink.' I'm like that. Sometimes I want to be alone. I said, 'You two stay here.' Emily wanted to come with me, but I said no. Finally I said, 'Stay here and watch the telly.' Emily said there was nothing on telly. I said, 'Then you can go to bed together.' I didn't care. That's the way I am."

  I said, "What was Brian's reaction when you told him he could go to bed with your girlfriend?"

  Fuggle thought a moment, then said, "He just smiled." And Fuggle began to smile, too, though his eyes remained shut.

  ***

  Bridport had no surprises for me. It was one of the few places on the British coast I actually knew. I had once lived up the road at South Bowood, which was a crossroads, four houses, and a pub. The pub, called the Gollop Arms, was now closed for good, and the owner—in England an owner was more like a pharisee than a publican—in retirement.

  The prettiest place on the coast near here was a hill called Golden Cap. I took a bus to Morcombelake and climbed the hill and then set off in the sunshine for Lyme Regis, making my way through the woods and along the cliffs to Charmouth. It was only two miles from Charmouth to Lyme Regis. The rocky shore was full of fossils, and it was much easier and quicker than along the high cliffs and through the back gardens of bungalows. But when the tide was up it was impossible to walk along the shore.

  I asked a man selling tickets at the parking lot at Charmouth whether I had time to walk to Lyme on the beach. He said that the high tide was at ten to three.

  "It's half-past eleven now," I said, "so the tide's only halfway up."

  "It's more than halfway at Lyme," he said. His name was Warren Hawtree. "You might get stuck."

  I said, "What do you think I should do?"

  "I'll have to ask," Mr. Hawtree said.

  He returned a few minutes later and said, "The old feller says you can just make it if you hurry. Otherwise you'll be caught by the tide."

  I began to speak, but he shooed me away, saying, "Don't hang about!"

  I set off, jumping from rock to rock. The fossils were visible on the rock surfaces—petrified snails on one slab and fossilized fish on another. All these rocks had tumbled from the cliff, and there was no law against hacking them to pieces, looking for an ichthyosaurus (the first one was found near here in 1811). But I did not pause. Lyme was shining gently above its stone pier. Behind me I could see where I had walked all the way from the Chesil Bank and Weymouth. The Isle of Portland was indistinct and blubberlike; it could have been a whale that had blundered against the Dorset coast to die.

  Because of the tide, I was the only person on this stretch of beach. It was deserted and full of cracks and corners—another of the places where I expected to find a corpse: a murder victim, a suicide, or more likely someone who had accidentally drowned and been washed ashore. I had never had this spooky feeling in a wild country, in Africa or Asia, but on the British coast, whenever I was in a lonely place, I looked down and expected to see a dead man.

  The tide was high near Lyme, washing against the cement slope of the seawall. There was room to walk, but the wall was covered in green sea slime, so it was very slippery. I crossed it on all fours and at Lyme I felt as if I had won a close race.

  "That's where they made that film," a shuffling gent named Beaver said, and he smiled at the Cobb, remembering the film he had seen up in Swindon, where he lived. He had motored down to Lyme with the wife. He was not sure where he was headed. At his age, he said, you lived one day at a time. He wasn't thinking of retirement yet and certainly did not want to move to an elephants' graveyard, as he called Bournemouth and Worthing and the other places where oldies were clinging to the coast. But the grandchildren were in the Midlands, and the wife didn't drive.

  Ellen Beaver said, "She was ever so pretty," thinking of the American actress who had stood on the Cobb in the movie.

  "It looks just the same!" Tom Oscott said, also smiling at the stone pier. The Golatelys and the Frekes were also staring.

  There was no glamour like the glamour of a movie, and this fairly tedious and pretentious romance set in Lyme Regis had succeeded where Persuasion had failed, and that year Lyme Regis was associated with an American actress named Meryl Streep rather than with Jane Austen.

  The town itself was a sort of Regency bottleneck, a continuous line of traffic squeezed between tea shops and coaching inns. The town was one of the many on the British coast that, delicately made and appearing to defy gravity, seemed magnetized to its steep cliffs. I spent my time there walking along the Undercliff, a strange landscape feature caused by a great landslip in 1839—twenty acres subsided and a seaside ravine opened, known as the Chasm. It was full of flowers and fossils, and it was protected, a little wooded preserve, between the cliffs and the sea. After a day of scrambling along the slippery Undercliff, I found a house on the way to Yawl with a VACANCIES sign in the window.

  This was the Skeats'. "We do bed and breakfast," Margaret Skeat said.

  Vesta Skeat was thirteen and sneaked lipstick when her mother was not looking. She had a loud laugh and marble-white skin and a T-shirt that said Adam and the Ants.

  "Is that all the clobber you have?" she said, standing in the doorway of my room as I unslung my knapsack. Other guests had had sleeping bags, some had tents, one had about five pairs of shoes. Vesta picked her elbow and told me she hated school.

  "You're the bed-and-breakfast man," Vesta Skeat then said.

  "That's me," I said.

  Vesta widened her eyes and said, "Madness!"

  Her mother screamed her name. Vesta said
softly, "Shut up, you silly cow," and then winked at me and went obediently downstairs.

  I locked the door. Bed-and-breakfast man? Madness? She was referring to a pop song about a tramp who traveled from house to house, sleeping on sofas, and it was sung by the group who called themselves Madness.

  The next day I took a country bus to Axminster. It was not far, but I had a train to catch. A man getting off the bus offered his newspaper to the driver. It was the Sun, with a Falklands headline: THIS IS IT!—suggesting that an invasion of the islands by the British was imminent and that it would soon result in a recapture of the territory.

  The bus driver said, "That's a Tory paper."

  "I'm through with it," Mr. Lurley said.

  Dan, the bus driver, said, "I don't want it."

  "Why not?" Mr. Lurley said.

  "Tory paper!"

  "They're all the same," Mr. Lurley said, and left it on the little shelf under the windshield with Dan's lunch bag (two cheese and chutney sandwiches, a small over-ripe tomato, and a Club Biscuit).

  Dan picked up the newspaper and threw it out the bus door.

  "They're not the bloody same," he said. "That's a Tory paper."

  This was up the road from Yawl on the way to Axminster, in the middle of the English countryside, the Conservative passenger, and the socialist behind the wheel.

  We traveled through the softly sloping meadows of Devon. A sign on every seat in the bus said, LOWER YOUR HEAD WHEN LEAVING YOUR SEAT, because there was a danger of banging your head on the luggage rack.

  To get to what was formerly the Great Western Railway, I bought a ticket at Axminster. This line had once been the London and South-Western Railway. All these railways had been trimmed and made smaller and cheaper. I rode to Exeter ("The town was stormed by the Danes in 876 ... It was wantonly attacked from the air in 1942, when 40 acres, including many ancient buildings, were destroyed") and then changed to a train for Dawlish, on the line once known as the Great Way Round.

  This track was laid by the engineering genius Isambard Kingdom Brunei on the very edge of the English coast. He had had to build stone embankments and tunnels—he had reshaped the coast. The line was a combination of slow curves and high-speed straights, surf on one side, cliffs on the other, five miles of excitement. And even along the River Exe it was an experience—the racing train and the river's tide slipping down, thunder and water, and then the bright light of the ocean bathing the train between tunnels.

  Dawlish looked wonderful as the train drew in, with the rain falling softly on the station platform on the sea. The platform was like a pier. But when I got out and the train drew away, I saw that Dawlish was small and dull. I asked a man about the hotels here and he said, "I don't know as much as I should about Dawlish," which was precisely what a man had said to me about Dungeness.

  I walked down the wet road to Holcombe to Took at the standing rocks at Holcombe Head called the Parson and Clerk, another set of dragon's teeth like Old Harry and His Wife and the Needles. I ambled along the seawall toward Teignmouth, and every so often a train would shoot past me and wet me and nearly blow me into the ocean. I thought that the train on the rocky shore, rolling through a storm, was one of the most beautiful sights in the world. I came to Teignmouth.

  "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 said I liked to walk. 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 just been walking along the seawall from Dawlish in the rain muttering, "Wombwell...warm-well ... nutwell ... cathole..."

  In quiet Teignmouth ("Keats stayed here in 1818, correcting the proofs of 'Endymion'"), under the red cliffs, old people were bowling in the rain at the green on the seafront, though the Promenade was empty and the pier was closed. At the Riviera Cinema, a turn-of-the-century theater, there were posters for the Teignmouth Operatic Society's production of The Pajama Game. I wandered around the town and, finding nothing better, returned and bought a ticket.

  The theater was less than a third full, mostly old people talking too loud and humming to the music. In the course of the production, one of the actors accidentally sat on a telephone, and another almost brained himself by backing against a steel post, and a large piece of scenery fell over during the solemn scene that followed the company picnic. There were fluffed lines and sour notes, and the American accents were either Irish and adenoidal or else frank West Country burrs, the local accent. In a dance number one elderly hoofer fell down with a thud that startled some of the audience from their sleep.

  But these were minor matters. The play was done with gusto, and the audience enjoyed it—they found it funny, they laughed, and they were moved by the romantic parts. It was a comedy about a union. In Britain they needed a comedy about a union. The cast was numerous and, judging from the program notes, they were all amateurs—clerks, shop assistants, accountants, teachers. The interpretation was shaky, but there was a clear understanding of American culture among the players—far greater than any equivalent group would have shown in the United States.

  Plays in England were seen to be a suitable outlet for the emotions. The English liked dressing up; they liked the clubby community of amateur dramatics; they enjoyed the pressure and teamwork of play production. For the duration of the play they were released from their lives and their work; they could shout and sing, they could express misery or joy; there was no such thing as a class system. They were free. So it struck me that even The Pajama Game in Teignmouth fulfilled the oldest reason for having a play: it was cathartic, and afterward everyone, players and spectators alike, felt much better.

  Back at the guest house Mrs. Starling introduced me to George Windus, who had sidewhiskers and baggy pants and a florid face. I suspected that Mrs. Starling hoped that Mr. Windus would ask the questions she was too timid to risk.

  "What brings you to Teignmouth then?" Mr. Windus said. His nose was swollen, the color of the Burgundy he was drinking.

  I was in publishing, I said. I had a week off. I was traveling along the coast.

  "What do you think?" Mr. Windus said, and pinched his whiskers.

  "Folkestone's nice," I said.

  "Folkestone!" he roared, and Mrs. Starling blinked.

  Now he spoke to Mrs. Starling, whose hands were clasped at her throat. Her mouth was small and uncertain, and her dark eyes watchful. Her hair was rumpled—ringlets in disarray—and very attractive.

  Mr. Windus was still shouting. "Twenty-five years ago I was in Folkestone! I wasn't above twenty-seven years old. I was there with my wife, staying on the top floor of a hotel—five flights up. On the day we left, I parked my Land-Rover at the front door to make it easy for us to pack up. We were loading and then out of nowhere came a furious little woman! She said to me, 'Parking that horrible motor out there at the entrance—you're lowering the tone of this hotel! Oh, you're lowering the tone!'"

  This made Mrs. Starling twitch.

  Mr. Windus turned to me and said, "No, Folkestone is not nice!"

  ***

  It was raining hard the next day—too wet for walking. I was no adventurer—so I bought a one-way ti
cket on the fast train to Plymouth. Once, this was called the Cornish Riviera Express, on the Great Western Railway; now it was the Inter-City 125 on British Rail. I sat in second class and looked at Devon. Most of the passengers were old people, starting vacations. They talked very loud. I sometimes had the impression that the whole of southern England was full of deaf people talking much too loud.

  The rain came down. We went along the north bank of the muddy Teign to Newton Abbot, which looked very ugly in the storm. We set off again at a good clip.

  "There's none of that old-time noise," Mr. Purewell said. "No whistles and bells and that. It can play tricks on you! You're saying goodbye to someone, and the train just pulls out and surprises you. There's no warning! But I've got a great appreciation for these One-Two-Fives and"—he paused; we went a mile; he resumed—"I used to be a bit puzzled why they were called that. I asked a few people. And then I was told it was their maximum speed."

  We were in the tame and gentle hills of Devon, near Totnes ("It consists mainly of one long congested street with many old houses with interesting interiors..."). Here the rain made the landscape mild, and sheep grazed near flowering hedgerows, and from the railway tracks to the horizon there were ten shades of green.

  "I gave up smoking," Mr. Gussage said. "The queer thing was it had never entered my head to do it! But it was budget time, you see. I went into my tobacconist for my usual tin and he said, 'We've been sold out for a fortnight.' Then I thought of giving up. I'd nothing to smoke—they were out of Three Nuns. And I managed. Now if anyone smokes in my house, I open the windows. It don't half make a house dirty—smoke. Sometimes, with people smoking, I can hardly see across the room."

  Lloyd Gifford was Mr. Gussage's friend. They were bound for Plymouth and a guest house near the Hoe. They were in their seventies and carrying on a shouted conversation.

  Mr. Gifford said, "My father smoked! He loved his pipe, my father. I remember what he smoked. It was called Ogden's. The tin was orange. There was a picture of an Indian on it. On his birthday, or at Christmas, we always gave him a tin of Ogden's. He loved his pipe."