The Kingdom by the Sea

by Paul Theroux

  One night I watched Damien-Omen II with eight of them in the so-called T.V. Lounge—the back parlor, with extra chairs. I was astonished at the silliness of the movie, but I looked around the room and saw that the Welsh ladies were squinting seriously at it. It was so preposterous, I wanted to hoot. The Devil's son was somehow living with an American family—the fact that they were obscenely rich and living like lords in Chicago was supposed to make it believable. The Devil's son had flinty eyes and went to a military academy, where periodically he reverted to his devilish self, calling down Satan's wrath on the school bullies. There was often a shiny crow overhead, croaking and doing damage—wreaking havoc was how one was supposed to view it. Nothing in this plot made me regret that I had missed Omen I, but because I had missed it, I had to ask questions of the Welsh ladies. I always got prompt replies.

  "Who is that man?"

  "One of the Devil's Disciples," Miss Ellis said, with a slewed Welsh emphasis on the last syllable.

  Some of the ladies were knitting. One read a newspaper during the commercial breaks. They chatted about Wimbleball and Dunster. But they were silent during the movie. Only I spoke up—because I was confused.

  "What's that statue?"

  "Oh, that will be the Whore of Babylon, I expect," Miss Thomas said in her sweet Welsh voice.

  The little brat had 666 inscribed on his scalp.

  "That's the Number of the Beast," Miss Ellis said.

  But I hadn't asked.

  "Revelations," Miss Parry-Williams said.

  Toward midnight, after most of the characters had been murdered by the Devil's son, the film ended. The parlor was now filled with the syrupy smell of the Welsh ladies' cologne. They stifled yawns and stood up.

  Miss Thomas said, "I shouldn't be a bit surprised if we saw Omen Three before very long! Good night, Gwyneth; good night, Alice: good night—"

  ***

  The schoolteachers made me impatient to see Wales. They looked English, but their demeanor was amused and remote. They whispered at breakfast, they were very polite, even circumspect; they behaved as though in a foreign land.

  There was no path on this stretch of coast to Bristol. I put my maps aside and took the West Somerset Railway. It was Britain's longest private line—twenty-five miles, operating between Minehead and Taunton. The British Rail service had ended in 1971. The West Somerset line was both a passion and a business for the people who ran it; some were volunteers. The station at Minehead had been preserved as a sort of usable antique, full of nostalgic signs advertising cigarettes and motor oil. That aspect—the backward-looking part of it—rather irritated me. The trouble with railway buffs was that they were not really interested in going anywhere. They were playing—taking photographs, posing on locomotives, collecting engine numbers. They relished the dusty aesthetics of railway lore.

  They especially liked dressing up. That seemed to be part of the English character—entering into fantasy, putting on different clothes, and setting the old dull personality aside. It was what made amateur dramatics in England so energetic; drag acts here were so humorous that they did not need the justification of being wholesome. And so much of English life required costumes—clothes represented freedom or power or a new self. The members of the House of Lords wore ermine, and Oxbridge students wore robes, and even milkmen wore distinctive leather jerkins; and there was no more serious boast than a bowler hat. It was the railway buff who crossed the thin line between dressing up and travesty—the English seldom bothered to make much of a distinction between the two in any case. The reward for restarting a railway line was the chance to dress up as a Stationmaster or a Conductor or a Guard or even a Sweeper—with a uniform and special buttons and a distinct kind of hat.

  The train was full of joy-riders pretending to be passengers; there and back, that was always the railway buff's itinerary. They liked the atmosphere. They took pictures of each other and of the woodwork and steam. We went along the shore to Dunster and its dark brown castle ("The Dutch embossed leather hangings are outstanding"), then on to Watchet, turning inland for Williton. Still the railway buffs snapped pictures and marveled at the old signs—"Woodbines" and "Pratt's Motor Spirit" and "Craven 'A'—Will Not Affect Your Throat." I gathered that these signs excited memories of the old days, when there were hundreds of trains like this rattling through the English hills. At just the point where the railway buff's excitement was at its most feverish ("Crikey, Rafe, don't it take you back?"), and they began unpacking sandwiches from their hampers and setting up their thermos flasks of hot tea, the train stopped at Bishops Lydeard and everyone was ordered out. We were put onto a bus and taken in silence to Taunton. So the West Somerset Railway was something like Butlin's Holiday Camp—lots of razzmatazz but not much substance. Somehow it was not the answer to the transport need in that part of Somerset.

  ***

  On the 14:21 to Weston-super-Mare a man named Wilf pinched a piece of cigarette paper into a little gutter and then dropped strings of tobacco into it. He licked it and rolled it and twisted one end—it looked like a firecracker—and then turned to me and said, "Any idea what time we get to Bristol?"

  I said I didn't know. "I'm going to Weston-super-Mare."

  He set his cigarette on fire and then took it out of his mouth and said sheesh, expelling the smoke. "Better you than me."

  And then, perhaps because he knew I was going to Weston-super-Mare, Wilf avoided me and showed no interest in conversation. Or perhaps my knapsack had put him off? And yet I found that wearing a knapsack was a kind of advertisement of willingness, and more than anything it stirred the English passion for giving directions. Giving directions here was a form of conversation. But Wilf just smoked and sulked, and when I got off the train he shook his head, as if indicating that I was making a big mistake.

  Under a dark collapsing sky, Weston-super-Mare looked bleak and residential and rather funless. Like Bexhill and Worthing and some other places on the south coast, it was a large town with the soul of a suburb. And it was in such places that I regretted the endless roads of flat housefronts and pined for a little vulgarity or something vicious. In Weston-super-Mare I was directed to the Waxworks.

  On the way there, down the Promenade, I saw that the wind had whipped the water into troughs. Even in this poor light there was a wonderful view—of Wales, of the two black islands, Flat Holm and Steep Holm, and at the end of the beach a curved loaf-shaped landspit called Brean Down. The beach was long and mostly empty and very gray, and it was flatter than the water. Parked on the sand, as in a cartoon of desert mirages, were a red Punch and Judy booth and two yellow huts, one labeled TEA-STALL and the OTHER SHELLFISH BAR. A flapping pennant said DONKEY RIDES—20 PENCE. The few people on the beach lay heavily bundled-up on the sand, like war wounded on a beachhead. Their faces were tight with discomfort. A fat old lady with wild hair, wearing a winter coat but barefoot, stood and howled, "Arthur!" The donkeys stamped and shuddered in a little group, looking thoroughly baffled. And here on the Promenade hunched-over ladies with big handbags tipped their stoutness into the wind and breathed loudly through their teeth. Across the street at the Winter Gardens people were buying tickets for tonight's show, Cavalcade of Song. Beyond the donkeys, beyond the fat barefoot lady and the Punch and Judy booth, a new island surfaced and sprouted trees. Then I saw it was a ship going by.

  I was so unaccustomed to a place like Weston-super-Mare that with a little concentration I saw it in a surrealistic way. What were all these different things doing there? They had accumulated over the years, slowly, piling up like the tidewrack, and because it had happened so slowly, no one questioned it or found it strange. And this was also why I could spend days in the seaside resorts, fascinated by the way the natural coast had been deranged and cluttered. It did not matter much whether a town was pretty or ugly—anyway, ugly ones were often the most telling. The image of the tidewrack was accurate in some places, but other towns were like river mouths, where, mounting like silt, a century of pulv
erized civilization had been deposited, having floated from the darker interior of England.

  At the Waxworks there were models of movie stars and sports figures on the first floor, and on the next floor there were murderers. The top floor showed various torture chambers. In his essay "The Decline of the English Murder," George Orwell wrote, "If one examines the murders which have given the greatest amount of pleasure to the British public, the murders whose story is known in its general outline to almost everyone and which have been made into novels and rehashed over and over again by the Sunday papers, one finds a fairly strong family resemblance running through the greater number of them." The "family resemblance" is a quiet respectable man who reluctantly decides on murder because it seems less disgraceful than, for example, being caught in adultery; the crime is meticulously planned and carried out—but there is a tiny slip and the murderer is caught. "With this kind of background, a crime can have dramatic and even tragic qualities which make it memorable and excite pity for both victim and murderer."

  The murderers shown at the Waxworks suited this analysis, and they also illustrated the decline. Here was the Yorkshire Ripper (Peter Sutcliff) and the Black Panther (Donald Neilson). The Waxworks was popular partly because the English were law-abiding, and no one knows more inner turmoil or is so susceptible to the romance of wrongdoing than the law-abiding person. But it was also popular for a much more straightforward reason: in British law the criminal's privacy—and very often his identity—is strenuously protected. A man may murder and be caught and be found guilty without the public ever seeing his face. No picture of the Black Panther had ever been published. So the revelation of the wax figures excited the watcher like certain kinds of pornography, and the gory tableaux on the top floor—a whipping, a beheading, "The Death of a Thousand Cuts," had a similar interest for a person secretly starved for a bit of raw cruelty. It was like breaking a taboo, even though most of the murderers looked silly in lopsided wigs, and the torture victims looked like big shattered steak-and-kidney pies.

  And perhaps there was a connection between murderers and seaside resorts. Typically, the murderer committed his crime—wife-poisoning was the stereotype—and then went to a watering place like Weston-super-Mare, because it was easy to blend in with the ill-assorted types who were found there. And he was caught on the Promenade. It was one of the paradoxes of English life that the most respectable-looking places and the most innocent circumstances excited the strongest suspicions of crime.

  The next day I took the train to Bristol. I tried to interest myself in the St. Paul's District, where race riots had broken out the year before. There were gutted buildings, and some still stank of burned mattresses, but otherwise it seemed an ordinary slum. I spoke to an Indian sociologist, Dr. Barot, who said that the West Indian household had been very authoritarian. In the course of a generation or two the parents' authority had been weakened and the children had stopped submitting. In fact, the children had become British; but there was no work, there was anger and aimlessness, and very few bothered to study at the higher levels. Only a handful of blacks attended Bristol University.

  "I could introduce you to some really angry blacks," a man named Fletcher said at my Bristol boardinghouse.

  But then the weather turned fine again and I decided that, instructive though it would be to meet some really angry blacks in Bristol, it had not been my intention on this coastal jaunt to invite gloom. And in a general sort of way, I knew why they were angry. So I declined the introduction and crossed the River Severn, which at that point was also the sea.

  10. The 16:28 to Tenby

  "IT'S THAT BUBBLE CAR over there," Mr. Crabb the guard said at Temple Meads Station in Bristol. He pointed to a three-car train, the sort I had been seeing on branch lines. I was now headed for Cardiff. A man named Hicks on this train said that he could remember the days when the Red Dragon Express ran to Cardiff—and here we were, he said, on this manky little train! I did not encourage him. I liked these trains, because it was possible to sit behind the driver in the first coach and look straight out the front window at the tracks ahead. And it was always interesting to watch the driver's busy hands on the controls.

  "We're pushing towards Stanley," Mr. Hicks said.

  He meant in the Falkland Islands. He was reading over my shoulder—Falklands news in my Times. I asked his opinion of the war.

  He said, "We have to do it. Our land's been taken. The Argies have to be stopped. They can't get away with it." He looked out the window and grunted. "That's how Hitler got started!"

  The train was rolling. On that line, you did not leave Bristol until you left England, because its suburbs straggled all the way to the Severn Tunnel, ten miles of housing estates and factories. As in other parts of England, the newer industrial buildings looked frail and temporary.

  The tunnel lasted a minute or so, and then we were traveling in a deep ditch. But I knew from the brown stones of the ditch walls, and the way they were cut and pointed, that we must be in Wales—although I could not see anything but a strip of blue sky and these walls. This was confirmed at the next stop, Cyfforded Twnel Hafren, Severn Tunnel Junction.

  We surfaced in Wales, and at once the landscape looked different: meadows and crooked hills and all the hawthorns in bloom. The factories were distant smudges. I had traveled enough in the past month to know that it was possible to tell which part of England I was in by the way the fields were marked—whether by a wall or a hedge or a fence, and what kind. The white hawthorns had been planted at the boundaries of every field, in a way I had never seen before: we were in another country. It was in fact a nation of like-minded people. The bilingual signs {Welcome/Croeso) were as unnecessary as the road signs in Canada, but like Canada's they served a political purpose—a cheap sop tossed to the nationalists.

  We passed a tumbledown farm, a small wood-frame factory, a row of poplars, some sheep. Now I understood why the Welsh had taken to Patagonia. I saw more farms, small and poor, but rural poverty always looked to me more bearable than the forms that poverty took in a city. Poverty brought people low and pushed them into the past. In the countryside this merely meant farming in a cruder way; poor city people had to go still farther back and become scavengers in order to survive.

  Newport rose up on the left, a power station and the rolling mills and furnaces of the doomed Llanwern Steelworks. The Victorian housefronts looked slightly foppish, with multicolored bricks and stripes. Sometimes Wales looked like another country, and at other times it seemed like an earlier version of England—upright and antique and dusty and churchgoing, with all the color schemes wrong.

  There were preparations afoot in Cardiff for the Pope's visit—he was due in three days. An altar had been erected and a "mass site" prepared up at Pontcanna Park in Llandaf, near the old cathedral ("Cromwell's soldiers used the nave as a tavern and post office, and the font as a pig trough, and burnt the cathedral's books at a formal ceremony at Cardiff Castle"). No Pope had ever visited Wales.

  In Cardiff, on Queen Street, Mrs. Prichard said, "So the Pope's staying with you, Doris?"

  "Yes? Oh, well, never mind," Doris said. "I'll make him comfortable."

  "He'll want looking after," Mrs. Prichard went on, still not smiling. "He's got a healthy appetite, that one, all the traveling."

  "I'll tell the milkman to leave me an extra pint," Doris said. "The Pope's stopping upstairs, I'll say."

  "You'll want more than an extra pint of milk! I should buy some gammon and cabbage. He's Polish, Doris."

  As soon as I saw it, I wanted to leave Cardiff. In any case, it was seldom my intention to linger in the large cities. In Britain they were cavernous and intimidating, like the fortresses they had once been. They seemed to have heavy eyebrows. They were not for walkers. They were full of indoor miseries that made me impatient. Their buildings were blackened and their people wary of my questions. I never got lost in the countryside, but these cities could make me feel as if I were drowning. It could take a day o
r two to find out how to leave these places. They were always encumbered with ruins. Cardiff was no place for a pedestrian like me.

  My remedy, walking to Barry Island, did not work. It was a peninsula, but even so it was unreachable on foot. There were no paths here, only the mazy roads of South Glamorgan, packed solid with houses. In Grangetown I thought: They really do look like towns from years ago, living on in old-fashioned, semirespectable decrepitude. I walked on to Cogan, an awful-looking place. Wales was visibly poorer than England but much better-natured.

  At Cadoxton I found a railway station and went the rest of the way on the branch line, sitting behind the driver. There were signs painted on the slates of house roofs: they were meant to be seen from the train. The letters were two feet high, GOD IS LOVE, one said, and another one, CHRIST DIED FOR THE UNGODLY. We passed several acres of rusty locomotives—a sort of graveyard for steam engines—and then came to Barry Island. Half of it was a Butlin's camp, and the rest was a small seafront with severe amusements.

  I sat on the front, near a stall selling whelks and jellied eels, listening to the flap of the Butlin's flags and wondering what to do next. There were no hotels in this place! It was for day-trippers—miners mostly, who rode out of the valleys for one frantic day. But now miners earned good salaries and were able to go farther afield. So Barry Island had its holiday camp and its deserted arcades. I made a note: Not much like Weston-super-Mare —because Weston-super-Mare was twelve miles away, across the bay.

  I studied my map and decided to go to Llanelli. My train took me past Bridgend and Port Talbot and Neath. The landscape was industrial and yet was motionless and might have been dead. It was also a pebbledash wilderness of two-story houses, great chains and terraces of them, arranged on narrow streets, striping the hills. It was nineteenth-century order, the workers' barracks, with rougher hills one range away—the Vale of Glamorgan and then into West Glamorgan. I changed trains in Swansea. Swansea was a vast cankered valley of sorrowful houses and gray churches and shut-down factories. I thought: No wonder the Welsh are religious! In South Wales, industry had burned and cleared the landscape and stacked it with sooty buildings. But most of the industries had failed—or looked moribund—and you could not look out the train window without thinking of gangrene.