The Kingdom by the Sea

by Paul Theroux

  And like all families, I said, sentimental and suspicious and quarrelsome and secretive. But Welsh nationalism was at times like a certain kind of feminism, very monotonous and one-sided.

  She said, "I suppose it does look that way, if you're a man."

  I could have said: Didn't it look that way to you when you were a man?

  She said, "As for the caravans and tents, yes, they look awful. But the Welsh don't notice them particularly. They are not noted for their visual sense. And those people, the tourists, are seeing Wales. I'm glad they're here, in a way, so they can see this beautiful country and understand the Welsh."

  Given the horror of the caravans, it was a very generous thought, and it certainly was not my sentiment. I always thought of Edmund Gosse saying, "No one will see again on the shore of England what I saw in my early childhood." The shore was fragile and breakable and easily poisoned.

  Jan Morris was still speaking of the Welsh. "Some people say that Welsh nationalism is a narrow movement, cutting Wales off from the world. But it is possible to see it as liberating Wales and giving it an importance—of bringing it into the world."

  We finished lunch and went outside. She said, "If only you could see the mountains. I know it's boring when people say that—but they really are spectacular. What do you want to do?"

  I said that I had had a glimpse of Portmeirion from the train and wanted a closer look, if there was time.

  We drove there in her car and parked under the pines. She had known the architect Clough Williams-Ellis very well. "He was a wonderful man," she said. "On his deathbed he was still chirping away merrily. But he was very worried about what people would say about him. Funny man! He wrote his own obituary! He had it there with him as he lay dying. When I visited him, he asked me to read it. Of course, there was nothing unflattering in it. I asked him why he had gone to all the trouble of writing his own obituary.

  "He said, 'Because I don't know what the Times will write in the obituary they do of me.'"

  We walked through the gateway and down the stairs to the little Italian fantasy town on this Welsh hillside.

  "He was obsessed that they would get something wrong or be critical. He had tried every way he could of getting hold of his Times obituary—but failed, of course. They're always secret."

  She laughed. It was that hearty malicious laugh.

  "The funny thing was, I was the one who had written his obituary for the Times. They're all written carefully beforehand, you know."

  I said, "And you didn't tell him?"

  "No." Her face was blank. Was she smiling behind it? "Do you think I should have?"

  I said, "But he was on his deathbed."

  She laughed again. She said, "It doesn't matter."

  There was a sculpted bust of Williams-Ellis in a niche, and resting crookedly on its dome was a hand-scrawled sign saying, the bar UPSTAIRS IS OPEN.

  Jan said, "He would have liked that."

  We walked through the place, under arches, through gateways, past Siamese statuary and Greek columns and gardens and pillars and colonnades; we walked around the piazza.

  "The trouble with him was that he didn't know when to stop."

  It was a sunny day. We lingered at the blue Parthenon, the Chantry, the Hercules statue, the town hall. You think: What is it doing here? More cottages.

  "Once, when we lost a child, we stayed up there in that white cottage." She meant herself and Elizabeth, when they were husband and wife.

  There was more. Another triumphal arch, the Prior's Lodge, pink and green walls.

  Jan said, "It's supposed to make you laugh."

  But instead, it was making me very serious, for this folly had taken over forty years to put together, and yet it still had the look of a faded movie set.

  "He even designed the cracks and planned where the mossy parts should be. He was very meticulous and very flamboyant, too, always in one of these big, wide-brimmed antediluvian hats and yellow socks."

  I was relieved to get out of Portmeirion; I had been feeling guilty, with the uncomfortable suspicion that I had been sightseeing—something I had vowed I would not do.

  Jan said, "Want to see my gravestone?"

  It was the same sudden, proud, provocative, mirthful way that she had said, Want to see my grave?

  I said of course.

  The stone was propped against the wall of her library. I had missed it before. The lettering was very well done, as graceful as the engraving on a bank note. Tt was inscribed Jan & Elizabeth Morris. In Welsh and English, above and below the names, it said,

  Here Are Two Friends

  At the End of One Life

  I said it was as touching as Emily Dickinson's gravestone in Amherst, Massachusetts, which said nothing more than Called Back.

  When I left, and we stood at the railway station at Porthmadog, Jan said, "If only these people knew who was getting on the train!"

  I said, "Why should they care?"

  She grinned. She said, "That knapsack—is that all you have?"

  I said yes. We talked about traveling light. I said the great thing was to have no more than you could carry comfortably and never to carry formal clothes—suits, ties, shiny shoes, extra sweaters: what sort of travel was that?

  Jan Morris said, "I just carry a few frocks. I squash them into a ball—they don't weigh anything. It's much easier for a woman to travel light than a man."

  There was no question that she knew what she was talking about, for she had been both a man and a woman. She smiled at me, looking like Tootsie, and I felt a queer thrill when I kissed her goodbye.

  12. The 20:20 to Llandudno Junction

  "I LOVE STEAM, don't you?" Stan Wigbeth said to me on the Ffestiniog Railway, and then he leaned out the window. He was not interested in my answer, which was "Up to a point." Mr. Wigbeth smiled and ground his teeth in pleasure when the whistle blew. He said there was nothing to him more beautiful than a steam "loco." He told me they were efficient and brilliantly made; but engine drivers had described to me how uncomfortable they could be, and how horrible on winter nights, because it was impossible to drive most steam engines without sticking your face out the side window every few minutes.

  I wanted Mr. Wigbeth to admit that they were outdated and ox-like, dramatic-looking but hell to drive; they were the choo-choo fantasies of lonely children; they were fun but filthy. Our train was pulled through the Welsh mountains by a Fairlie, known to the buffs as a "double engine"—two boilers—"the most uncomfortable engine I've ever driven," a railwayman once told me. It was very hot for the driver, because of the position of the boilers. The footplate of the Fairlie was like an Oriental oven for poaching ducks in their own sweat. Mr. Wigbeth did not agree with any of this. Like many other railway buffs, he detested our century.

  This had originally been a tram line, he told me; all the way from Porthmadog to Blaenau Ffestiniog—horse trams, hauling slate from the mountain quarries. Then it was named the Narrow Gauge Railway and opened to passengers in 1869. It was closed in 1946 and eventually reopened in stages. The line was now—this month—completely open.

  "We're lucky to be here," Mr. Wigbeth said, and checked his watch—a pocket watch, of course: the railway buffs timepiece. He was delighted by what he saw. "Right on time!"

  It was a beautiful trip to Blaenau, on the hairpin curves of the steep Snowdonia hills and through the thick evening green of the Dwyryd Valley. To the southeast, amid the lovely mountains, was the Trawsfynydd Nuclear Power Station, three or four gigantic gray slabs. An English architect, noted for his restrained taste, had been hired in 1959 to make it prettier, or at least bearable, but he had failed. Perhaps he should have planted vines. Yet this monstrosity emphasized the glory of these valleys. I found the ride restful, even with the talkative Mr. Wigbeth beside me. Then he was silenced by a mile-long tunnel. The light at the end of the tunnel was Blaenau Ffestiniog, at the head of the valley.

  "Where are you off to, then?" Mr. Wigbeth asked.

 
"I'm catching the next train to Llandudno Junction."

  "It's a diesel," he said, and made a sour face.

  "So what?"

  "I don't call that a train," he said. "I call that a tin box!"

  He was disgusted and angry. He put on his engine driver's cap and his jacket with the railway lapel pins, and after a last look at his conductor-type pocket watch, he got into his little Ford Cortina and drove twenty-seven stop-and-go miles back to Bangor.

  I walked around Blaenau. I had thought of spending the night there, but it seemed a dull place and I felt negligent, being away from the coast. It was still like a bright afternoon when I took the 20:20 to Llandudno Junction, but moments after leaving Blaenau Station we plunged into a tunnel two miles long. When we emerged I began looking for the peak of Snowdon on the west, and imagined that I saw it at Dolwyddelan. The castle ("In 1281 Llewelyn the Last was here...") was solitary and high and looked like a bad molar. At Bettws-y-Coed I searched for Ugly House ("once an overnight stop for Irish drovers"), but could not see it. The village was pretty but overcrowded this hot evening, and I had a happy, hooky-playing feeling as I left on the empty train rolling north through the Vale of Conway, stopping at Llanrwst and Dolgarrog. Now the light was golden, and the motion of the little train lulled me as we traveled along the river under the peaceful hills to the coast.

  ***

  I was not frightened at the hotel in Llandudno until I was taken upstairs by the pockmarked clerk; and then I sat in the dusty room alone and listened. The only sound was my breathing, from having climbed the four flights of stairs. The room was small; there were no lights in the passageway; the wallpaper had rust stains that could have been spatters of blood. The ceiling was high, the room narrow: it was like sitting at the bottom of a well. I went downstairs.

  The clerk was watching television in the lounge—he called it a lounge. He did not speak to me. He was watching "Hill Street Blues," a car chase, some shouting. I looked at the register and saw what I had missed before—that I was the only guest in this big dark forty-room hotel. I went outside and wondered how to escape. Of course I could have marched in and said, "I'm not happy here—I'm checking out," but the clerk might have made trouble and charged me. Anyway, I wanted to punish him for running such a scary place.

  I walked inside and upstairs, grabbed my knapsack, and hurried to the lounge, rehearsing a story that began, "This is my bird-watching gear. I'll be right back—" The clerk was still watching television. As I passed him (he did not look up), the hotel seemed to me the most sinister building I had ever been in. On my way downstairs I had had a moment of panic when, faced by three closed doors in a hallway, I imagined myself in one of those corridor labyrinths of the hotel in the nightmare, endlessly tramping torn carpets and opening doors to discover again and again that I was trapped.

  I ran down the Promenade to the bandstand and stood panting while the band played "If You Were the Only Girl in the World." I wondered if I had been followed by the clerk. I paid twenty pence for a deck chair, but feeling that I was being watched (perhaps it was my knapsack and oily shoes?), I abandoned the chair and continued down the Promenade. Later, I checked into the Queens Hotel, which looked vulgar enough to be safe.

  Llandudno was the sort of place that inspired old-fashioned fears of seaside crime. It made me think of poisoning and suffocation, screams behind varnished doors, creatures scratching at the wainscoting. I imagined constantly that I was hearing the gasps of adulterers from the dark windows of those stuccoed terraces that served as guest houses—naked people saying gloatingly, "We shouldn't be doing this!" In all ways, Llandudno was a perfectly preserved Victorian town. It was so splendid-looking that it took me several days to find out that it was in fact very dull.

  It had begun as a fashionable watering place and developed into a railway resort. It was still a railway resort, full of people strolling on the Promenade and under the glass and iron canopies of the shopfronts on Mostyn Street. It had a very old steamer ("Excursions to the Isle of Man") moored at its pier head, and very old hotels, and a choice of very old entertainments— Old Mother Riley at the Pavilion, the Welsh National Opera at the Astra Theatre doing Tosca, or Yorkshire comedians in vast saloon bars telling very old jokes. "We're going to have a loovely boom competition," a toothy comedian was telling his drunken audience in a public house near Happy Valley. A man was blindfolded and five girls selected, and the man had to judge—by touching them—which one's bum was the shapeliest. It caused hilarity and howls of laughter; the girls were shy—one simply walked offstage; and at one point some men were substituted and the blindfolded man crouched and began searching the men's bums as everyone jeered. And then the girl with the best bum was selected as the winner and awarded a bottle of carbonated cider called Pomagne.

  I overheard two elderly ladies outside at the rail, looking above Llandudno Bay. They were Miss Maltby and Miss Thorn, from Glossop, near Manchester.

  "It's a nice moon," Miss Maltby said.

  "Aye," Miss Thorn said. "It is."

  "But that's not what we saw earlier this evening."

  "No. That was the sun."

  Miss Maltby said, "You told me it was the moon."

  "It was all that mist, you see," Miss Thorn said. "But I know now it was the sun."

  The town was dominated by two silver-gray headlands of swollen limestone, Great and Little Orme. From Llandudno's pier head on a clear day it was possible to see the Lancashire coast, and from West Parade on the other side (where Lewis Carroll stayed with the Liddell family and wrote part of Alice), Bangor and the shore of Anglesey were greenishly apparent across Conway Bay.

  ***

  There were two Indians in my railway compartment, trying to open a briefcase. It had a combination lock, and they had the combination, but still they could not open it. They quarreled a little, taking turns sighing at the stubborn lock, and then one said, "You would be so kind?" I took the briefcase into my lap and spanked it and it popped open. It contained some combs, a bottle of hair oil, a blue diary, a Bengali movie magazine, and a plastic pouch that was zippered shut. While one Indian removed a comb from the briefcase, the other Indian picked up a valise and left the train, muttering.

  The remaining Indian combed his hair and said he had never seen the muttering one before in his life. They had met over the briefcase.

  This Indian, Mr. Amin, said, "I am in catering business." He smiled and added, "That is to say, catering and restaurantooring."

  He owned a curry shop in Bangor.

  "I like Bangor and I am liking Vales," he said. "And the Vellish I am speaking as vell."

  "Say something in Welsh," I suggested.

  "I can say some few words for you," Mr. Amin said. "You are helping me with my briefcase and making me so happy. I am thinking, and that other man, too, perhaps ve are not unlocking my case! And—vhat you vanted?"

  "Welsh," I said.

  He straightened his head and in a clacking voice said, "Bore da. Good marning. Croeso. Velcome. Diolch yn fawr. Oh, thank you very much. Nos da. Good evening. Cymru am byth. Vales forever."

  I said, "Are you going to stay in Bangor forever?"

  "Who knows about forever?"

  "Let's say five years."

  He said, "Yes."

  "How many Bangladeshis are there in Bangor?"

  "Not more than eight."

  "Do you have a mosque?"

  "No," he said. "But sometimes ve use a certain floor in the Student Union building."

  "Do you have a mullah?"

  He said, "Ven five or six pray, vun can be mullah."

  I asked, "How many children do you have?"

  "Questions! Questions!" He seemed short of breath; his face was a tight fit; he probably took me for the tax man.

  "Sorry, Mr. Amin. I have two children. Boys."

  He relaxed and looked envious. "You are lucky. I have three girls, and then I try again, and then I just get a boy last year."

  We entered a tunnel—silence—and
then emerged, and Bangor lay before us, big and gray. Mr. Amin gathered his briefcase and paper bags and made ready to get off the train.

  I said, "You could have settled anywhere in Britain, Mr. Amin. Why did you choose to settle in Bangor?"

  He said, "Because it reminds me of my town in Bangladesh. Bangor is just very like Sylhet."

  Was Sylhet severe and monotonous like this? Perhaps so. In any case, Indians had often told me how Cheltenham reminded them of certain towns in the Punjab, and Scotland was reminiscent of Simla, and after the Sultan of Zanzibar was overthrown he took himself to Eastbourne, claiming that it somewhat resembled his fragrant but decrepit sultanate in the Indian Ocean.

  I stayed on the train and crossed the Menai Strait to Anglesey. The island was flat, as if it had detached itself from the mainland and become waterlogged. Its meadows were no more than gentle swells, and small houses and broken cottages lay scattered at great distances. It possessed the haunted look that Cornwall had, its rocks like ruins, its stillness like suspense. It had been the Druids' last outpost, and it looked it. In such a flat grassy place it was possible to see that there was nothing threatening, and yet this apparent openness was itself eerie and suggested invisible dangers. It was the sound of the wind, the pale light, the flat shadows on the low ground.

  The first station was the famous but unsayable Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch ("St. Mary's Church in a hollow by the white hazel close to the rapid whirlpool by the red cave of St. Tysilio"). It is usually called Llanfair P.G., but the full name appeared on the station signboard, which was fifteen feet long. There was nothing else of interest at the station or in the town, and indeed it was indistinguishable from the other twenty-two places called Llanfair (St. Mary's) in Wales. I was told that the long name had been concocted by the village tailor a century ago so that the place would seem singular, much as Cross Keys, Pennsylvania, had been officially renamed Intercourse.

  The stations and villages along the route to Holyhead looked worn down and depressing. It was as if all the millions of lonely Irish people who traveled this way—this was the principal route to Ireland—had devoured the landscape with their eyes, looked upon it with such hunger that there was little of it left to take hold of and examine. It sometimes seemed that way to me in Britain, in the busiest places, as if a castle's ramparts or a hillside or a village—supposedly so picturesque—had been eroded by two thousand years of admiring scrutiny, the penetration of people's eyes. No wonder they now stood on the shore and looked out to sea.