The Kingdom by the Sea

by Paul Theroux

  Bodorgan Station was empty, and nearby was an empty hotel; Ty Croes was one ruined cottage; and then the land grew stonier and harsher and looked the sort of place where only Druids could be happy—wind-flattened grass and pitted rocks, a few throaty crows and flocks of barking seagulls.

  After the village of Valley there was a causeway to Holy Island. We passed a large factory, Anglesey Aluminium, and slowed as we approached the town of Holyhead.

  Holyhead was one of a number of British towns that seemed to be dying—blackening like an extremity with gangrene. It was too far, too barren, too still. It had gone to sleep and would die without waking. The ferry business—boats to the Irish port of Dun Laoghaire—was so bad, they were advertising free liters of whiskey for anyone who made the trip. But the ferries remained empty: no one had any money here. In Anglesey, where the local accent was not Welsh but rather a jaw-twisting Birmingham neigh, I was told that the unemployment rate was 30 percent. It was a meaningless statistic—most statistics struck me as sounding frivolous and hastily invented—but the fact remained that people in Holyhead were visibly idle. They did not work, nor did they do much else but sit and stare. The tennis courts and football fields were empty, the bowling greens were empty—no sports. There was little drinking, because no one could afford it; no movies.

  "I sleep late and watch TV," a man named Gower told me. He had been on the dole for five years and was only thirty-two.

  The streets were empty. I walked through the town and felt a sense of despair, because I could not imagine that things would ever improve here. No one I met believed that the future would be any brighter, and a number of them said casually that they had thought of emigrating. Whenever British people spoke of emigration, they mentioned North America first—Europe was just as bad as Britain, they said, and Australia was too far.

  The younger ones had some hope. I deliberately sought out youths in Anglesey and asked them what their plans were. One thirteen-year-old told me he wanted to be a plasterer—I guessed that his father was a plasterer, but I was wrong. A fourteen-year-old told me he wanted to join the Royal Navy, and another's ambition was to be a carpenter. They hated school, and perhaps they were right to hate it; what job would school prepare them for? A sixteen-year-old told me that he was about to take an exam, and then he wanted to go to college. What would he study?

  "Catering," he said. His name was Brian Craster.

  I asked him if he meant cooking—being a chef.

  "Yeah," he said in his neighing accent, "it's a two-year course."

  "Then you get a job."

  "If there's one going. There's not much work around here. Just British Rail or the Tinto factory"—Rio Tinto Zinc ran Anglesey Aluminium—"but they've started to lay people off."

  "Do you do any cooking now, Brian?"

  "A bit," he said. "I can make cakes. Shepherd's pie and that."

  "Where do you want to be a chef?"

  "Maybe London. Maybe get a job at the Savoy."

  None of the youths I met in Holyhead had ever been to London. Brian Craster wanted to go, but he seemed a little fearful, and that made him sound defiant.

  It was all Council flats and uncut grass, barking dogs and broken stone walls. I felt sorry for the children, kicking tin cans, their hands in their pockets and their hair blowing, dreaming of being plasterers.

  I walked through most of the western part of Holy Island, around South Stack, and then back to the harbor. In a bus shelter overlooking New Harbour I saw a poem written in black ink.

  Now it is 1984.

  Knock-knock at your front door

  It's the suede denim secret police

  They have come for your uncool niece

  Come quickly to the camp

  You'll look nice as a drawstring lamp

  Don't worry—it's only a shower

  For your clothes—here's a pretty flower

  DIE on organic poison gas

  Serpent's egg already hatched

  You will croak you little clown

  When you mess with President Brown!

  As I stood copying this into my small notebook, a middle-aged couple approached the bus shelter. They were Owen and Esther Smallbone from the Council estate just west of Holyhead. They had a small flat, for which they paid £16 a week. Owen Smallbone had been an accounts clerk at the harbor and had taken a leave of absence for medical reasons—a bad back—but when he recovered sufficiently to return to his job, there was no job, and he had been on the dole ever since—four years. Esther sometimes earned a little money looking after the children of working mothers—the Smallbones had no children of their own—but there was not much child-minding these days, because the mothers were being laid off, weren't they? They were always the first to go. Recently, Owen's back had begun again to bother him, which was why they were taking the bus. They were on the way to the General Post Office on Boston Street to purchase a Television Broadcast Receiving Licence (Including Colour)—"apparatus for wireless telegraphy." They rented a Sony Trinitron eighteen inch for £12 a month. The license for watching it would cost £46.

  They were very suspicious of me. I wondered why, and then I saw the reason. I had put my notebook away, but I was still holding my pen. So I had probably written that crazy poem, or if not the poem, then perhaps I had drawn the picture of the penis, or else set down my telephone number with the message Ring Roger for a good time, guys, or—and this was the most likely—I was the one going around Holyhead scribbling FREE WALES and FWA, one of the arsonists. My knapsack told a story.

  The Smallbones glanced at my pen. They were very annoyed—they were decent people, but even decent people could not find work these days. They were law-abiding—masses of people never bothered to buy a TV license and didn't give a tinker's curse when the television-detector van parked in Mostyn Close and trained its radar on the flats, fully aware that people inside the flats were watching "Championship Darts" or "The Dukes of Hazzard" without a license. And the Smallbones respected public property: they hated graffiti, and these on the wall of the bus shelter had been written by perverts, lunatics, and fanatics. Sometimes it made them ashamed to be Welsh. Sometimes they felt like just jacking it in and going to Nova Scotia like the Davises, but that was years ago, and who wanted to hire a man with a bad back?

  Ten minutes passed. The bus did not come. I waited a few more minutes and then decided to walk. The Smallbones were still waiting, and after I had gone they examined the walls of the bus shelter, trying to determine which scribbles were mine.

  I returned to Llandudno Junction for the third time and then to Llandudno. Now I noticed that there were seagulls on the platform of Llandudno Station, thirty or forty of them, waiting the way pigeons waited at Waterloo.

  At last I decided to leave Wales. I took another train to Llandudno Junction. Today was Friday, and the train was full of people returning to their homes in industrial Lancashire and West Yorkshire. Some had been farther afield than Rhos-on-Sea and Colwyn Bay.

  "The people crowded round us," Janet Hosegood said. She was a librarian in Runcorn. She loved to travel. She had spent last year's Easter vacation on a group tour of three Chinese cities, Canton, Suchow, and Shanghai, as she was telling old Mr. Bolus, who had never been east of Mablethorpe.

  Mr. Bolus said, "Ee?"

  "They'd never seen eyes like ours," Miss Hosegood said. She was fifty-one and loved country walks. Spinster, she wrote when marital status was asked for. She hated the abbreviation "Ms."—"Miss!" she usually said, showing her teeth.

  Mr. Bolus said, "Ee?"

  "In Channah," Miss Hosegood said.

  "Ee?"

  "People's Repooblic," Miss Hosegood said.

  "Aye," Mr. Bolus said.

  "'cause their eyes are slanty-like," Miss Hosegood said.

  "Aye," Mr. Bolus said.

  "Six 'oondred and fifty pound it cost us, all in," Miss Hosegood said.

  But Mr. Bolus had been distracted from this talk of China by the bulldozers outside Colw
yn Bay, preparing to build something. It can only be something awful, he thought, for here there was mile after mile of shallys and villas and caravans and tents, facing the Irish Sea.

  At last Mr. Bolus looked away and said, "Ee?"

  Although it was a pleasant, rattly two-car train, it was rather full of people and belongings. But what was especially annoying to the others was the appearance of Roland Painter-Betty and his dog, Ollie, the pair of them pushing down the aisle and then taking the only empty seat—seats, rather, because Roland snagged the window and the dirty great Alsatian leaped onto the seat next to him.

  "Wonder if he paid full fare?" a man named Garside muttered.

  Janet Hosegood said, "That dog should be on the flipping floor."

  And they also hated the sight of Roland Painter-Betty's earring and chunky bracelet and Liberty scarf and the kind of puce-colored shoes no normal man would wear.

  It was all caravans here, from Abergele east, places with names like Golden Sands, just tin boxes, miles of them, on flat stretches of sand—no trees.

  We crossed the River Clwyd and came to Rhyl, which was stained with soot and looked punished. Its fun fair and amusement park were silent, and it looked truly terrible.

  Verna and Doreen, neighbors from Wallasey, had turned away from Rhyl. This was the last day of their holiday and they didn't want it spoiled—Verna explained that the sight of grotty places could leave a bad taste in your mouth. They talked about a mutual friend, Rose, who had recently moved into Stanley Road.

  "How's she getting on, then?" Verna asked.

  "Talks to everyone. She's got a word for everyone," Doreen said.

  "She's a Londoner."

  "Well, this is it, isn't it. Your Londoners are a very outgoing people, aren't they."

  Some of the caravans were on marshland, sinking badly, some of them broken-backed on Morfa Rhuddlan ("where in 759 the Welsh under Caradoc were routed by Offa of Mercia").

  No one said a word to Roland Painter-Betty or to Ollie, stinking and slavering on the seat next to him. Everyone knew Roland was getting away with murder. But strangers were not addressed on British trains: they might be maniacs, they might be rude, or, worse, they might come from the class above you. If it was certain the stranger was a foreigner, then it was just possible someone would say, "I wish you wouldn't do that." But Roland was a native, and probably a poofter, and they could be so touchy—worse than women, some of them.

  We stopped and everyone looked out the windows: Prestatyn. It was red brick, once important to the lead industry, then a holiday resort that had never quite caught on. COME TO SUNNY PRESTATYN, posters said, mocking the bleak place. The tide was down and sand mounted toward the shore, forming banks and low dunes. Behind Prestatyn lay the empty green hills of Denbighshire.

  The River Dee was hopeless with sand—seven miles wide at this point but scarcely navigable, as the brown bubbly flats of the Mostyn Bank seemed to prove. And the land was flat, too; the sheep had cropped it so closely and so evenly, it looked like the surface of stagnant water. The town of Flint had turned its back on the river. It had a sullen wintry look and the British industrial smells of foot rot, dead mice, and old socks. The junkyards outside Shotton were a warning, for Shotton's steelworks were shortly to close and become junkyards, leaving thousands without jobs.

  The sky was yellow-gray, like a certain kind of smoke. It was June, and in the immense torpor of the steaming day the passengers had begun to doze off, only one person acknowledging the fact that, just a mile from Chester, we crossed the Welsh border. Mr. Bolus said it had been the Welsh border for a thousand years.

  Janet Hosegood was talking, still telling Mr. Bolus—he was deaf, I had now decided—about the People's Republic of China, her last year's holiday.

  13. The 16:01 to Southport

  NOW I SAW British people lying stiffly on the beach like dead insects, or huddled against the canvas windbreaks they hammered into the sand with rented mallets, or standing on cliffs and kicking stones roly-poly into the sea—and I thought: They are symbolically leaving the country.

  Going to the coast was as far as they could comfortably go. It was the poor person's way of going abroad—standing at the seaside and staring at the ocean. It took a little imagination. I believed that these people were fantasizing that they were over there on the watery horizon, at sea. Most people on the Promenade walked with their faces averted from the land. Perhaps another of their coastal pleasures was being able to turn their backs on Britain. I seldom saw anyone with his back turned to the sea (it was the rarest posture on the coast). Most people looked seaward with anxious hopeful faces, as if they had just left their native land.

  I was in New Brighton ("Here Sibelius's music, conducted by the composer, was first publicly heard in England"), strolling past the green-haired punks and the Rockers, who carried booming transistor radios as big as suitcases, and listening to the pop group Raw Sewage howl their hit, "Kick It to Death." I had skipped Chester, considering it too far inland for my coastal purposes, and I had taken a train to Birkenhead.

  Five miles down the west bank of the River Mersey was Rock Ferry, a yellow and green ferry station made of wood and girders. It was the sort of grand Victorian structure the British were eager to demolish and replace with a building that did not need repainting—something made of corrugated plastic sheets bolted to iron pipes. That very day, the Kensington Town Hall in London had been pulled down, for although it was a fine example of a mid-Victorian baroque façade, the Tory Council said it was worth only half a million pounds. The site, they claimed, was worth eight times that to a property developer for a bombproof, high-density, Manhattan-style condo. So much for the Victorian baroque. Kensington needed cash, the councilors said. "We can't afford to be sentimental." It seemed only a matter of time before such a lovely building as this ferry landing was bulldozed into the river.

  Liverpool—it was obvious from the ferry—was full of elegant old buildings. They were heavy but graceful. The city had three cathedrals and many church spires, and just as many open spaces from the blasts of German bombs. (We live in a time of short memories. A German tourist in Liverpool told me that he found the city rather wrecked and depressing—he much preferred Scotland.) Liverpool was not pleasant—no city was—but it was not bad. It was elderly, venerable, tough, somewhat neglected, and it had a very exposed look, because it was a city on the sea, one of the few large cities in Britain that was subjected to ocean gales. That was the Liverpool look: weatherbeaten.

  I had expected it to be frightening: it was known as a city of riots. But it struck me as good-humored, and inhabited by many people as alien as I was, living more or less as they pleased in what had once been extremely fine houses—the Somali Social Centre was in a cracked Georgian house. It was the most Irish city in Britain, and so the most Catholic. The Pope had just visited and been wildly welcomed. The papal flags, yellow and white, were still fluttering from the beer signs on public houses and on streets down which the "pope-mobile" (it was bulletproof, in spite of its silly name) had passed.

  Emboldened by the apparent calm, I decided to walk from the pier head to the black district of Toxteth, which everyone called Liverpool Eight. The previous summer at about this time the district had been in flames. Most of Liverpool's forty thousand blacks lived in Liverpool Eight.

  I met a lady tramp. She was more gray than white, about sixty-odd, and had the self-indulgent look of the drunken duchesses who were pictured in the society pages of the Tatler. She wore a woolly hat. She was pulling a loaded cart and had a dog on a leash. I had never met a lady tramp with a dog. I had the impression that this was her whole household on the cart—all her clothes and furnishings. There was a stink in the cart that may have been food. Her name was Mary Wilson. She quickly pointed out that she was not the same Mary Wilson who was married to a former British Prime Minister.

  She said she would show me the way to Toxteth if I pulled her cart for a spell. I did so and nearly wrenched my arm, the
thing was so heavy. She said she had picked up some bottles. There was money in bottles if you knew where to flog them.

  She took a blackened pipe from under her rags and puffed it.

  "Like Harold," she said. "I enjoy my pipe."

  She meant Sir Harold Wilson, the former Prime Minister.

  Mary's uncle and aunt had gone to the United States. They had intended to settle, but they had returned to Liverpool.

  "There was a depression on at the time," she said. "Like this one." And puffed her pipe. It smelled of burning rags. "We'll never see the end of this one."

  She had the Liverpool knack of being able to speak without moving her lips.

  "What do you want in Toxteth?" she asked.

  "Just looking."

  "They had riots there," she said. "They bayned the place."

  "Who did?"

  "The kids!" She didn't say blacks.

  Liverpool used to be peaceable, she said. It wasn't peaceable anymore. It was a blewdy disgrace. It was dangerous.

  But it did not look disgraceful to me. It was better than the corresponding part of New York City, near the docks in Brooklyn, but had the same bricks and the same pong of dirt and oil and old iron.

  Mary Wilson finally shuffled away. Her little dog's claws scratched on the sidewalk like matches being struck as he trotted beside her.

  Mr. Duddy, a street-sweeper I met at the corner of Windsor Street, said, "Toxteth. Go to the cinema that's bayned to the ground, and when you coom to Princes Road, tayn right."