The Kingdom by the Sea

by Paul Theroux

  ***

  In a bed-and-breakfast place (Balfour Lodge) in Inverness I pondered the question as to whether Inverness could be regarded as on my coastal route. It was a matter of perspective. The map was not much help. Everything seemed to depend on how one described the Moray Firth. Was that part of the North Sea?

  And then I was too bored to do anything but set off immediately for Aberdeen. Balfour Lodge was operated by a quarrelsome couple named Alec and June Catchpenny. It was a cold house. The bathmat was damp. The Catchpennys sulked. Their dog looked diseased, and I wanted to tell them it ought to be put down. I hated Alec's bowling trophies. Nor did either Catchpenny speak to me. "Six pounds" were the only words spoken to me in my twenty hours at Balfour Lodge. But what they bellowed at each other made me suspect that if I were to go fossicking in their bedroom drawers, I would find what the dirty shops called "marital aids."

  I went, via Elgin and Insch, to Aberdeen on the 14:40. A new railway strike was threatened, and most of the passengers were talking angrily about the strikers.

  "They won't have jobs to come back to," said one man. This was Ivor Perry-Pratt, who described himself as being in an oil-related industry. He supplied the offshore rigs with nonslip rubber treads for ladders and walkways. It seemed they wore out very quickly or else perished in the wet and cold conditions. Business was good, but Ivor Perry-Pratt always wondered. Will it last? He sympathized somewhat with the railwaymen.

  His friend Eric Husker said, "They ought to sack the whole lot of them."

  Husker was in earth-moving equipment. Aberdeen was the fastest-growing city in Britain.

  "That's too drastic," Mr. Perry-Pratt said.

  "Rubbish. It's not drastic at all," Mr. Husker said. "And it will come—you'll see! This will either be a fully automated railway or it won't exist at all. Ivor, be reasonable. A few years ago there were twenty-five farm laborers on every farm. Now how many are there?"

  Mr. Perry-Pratt pleaded, "But look at unemployment!"

  Mr. Husker was implacable. He said, "We'll have to have a lot more unemployment before this country begins to run properly."

  Of course, he had a job.

  We reached the coast. Offshore, a four-legged oil rig looked like a mechanical sea monster defecating in shallow water. It was like a symbol of this part of Scotland. Aberdeen was the most prosperous city on the British coast—the healthiest finances, the brightest future, the cleanest buildings, the briskest traders. But that was not the whole of it. I came to hate Aberdeen more than any other place I saw. Yes, yes, the streets were clean; but it was an awful city.

  Perhaps it had been made awful and was not naturally that way. It had certainly been affected by the influx of money and foreigners. I guessed that in the face of such an onslaught the Aberdonians had found protection and solace by retreating into the most unbearable Scottish stereotypes. It was only in Aberdeen that I saw kilts and eightsome reels and the sort of tartan tightfistedness that made me think of the average Aberdonian as a person who would gladly pick a halfpenny out of a dunghill with his teeth.

  Most British cities were plagued by unemployed people. Aberdeen was plagued by workers. It made me think that work created more stress in a city than unemployment. At any rate, this sort of work. The oil industry had the peculiar social disadvantage of being almost entirely manned by young single men with no hobbies. The city was swamped with them. They were lonely. They prowled twilit streets in groups, miserably looking for something to do. They were far away from home. They were like soldiers in a strange place. There was nothing for them to do in Aberdeen but drink. I had the impression that the Aberdonians hated and feared them.

  These men had seen worse places. Was there in the whole world an oil-producing country that was easygoing and economical? "You should see Kuwait," a welder told me; "you should see Qatar." For such a man Aberdeen was civilization. It was better than suffering in an oil rig a hundred miles offshore. And anyone who had been in the Persian Gulf had presumably learned to do without a red-light district. Apart from drinking and dancing Scottish reels, there was not a single healthy vice available in Aberdeen.

  It had all the extortionate high prices of a boom town but none of the compensating vulgarity. It was a cold, stony-faced city. It did not even look prosperous. That was some measure of the city's mean spirit—its wealth remained hidden. It looked overcautious, unwelcoming and smug, and a bit overweight, like a rich uncle in dull sensible clothes, smelling of mildew and ledgers, who keeps his wealth in an iron chest in the basement. The windows and doors of Aberdeen were especially solid and unyielding; it was a city of barred windows and burglar alarms, of hasps and padlocks and Scottish nightmares.

  The boom town soon discovers that it is possible to make money out of nothing. It was true of the Klondike, where, because women were scarce, hags came to regard themselves as great beauties and demanded gold dust for their grunting favors; in Saudi Arabia today a gallon of water costs more than a gallon of motor oil. In Aberdeen it was hotel rooms. The Station Hotel, a dreary place on the dockside road across from the railway station, charged £48 a night for a single room, which was more than its equivalent would have cost at the Plaza in New York City. Most of the other hotels charged between £25 and £35 a night—fifty bucks on average—and the rooms did not have toilets. I went from place to place with a sense of mounting incredulity, for the amazing thing was not the high prices or the sleazy conditions but rather the fact that there were no spare rooms.

  For what I calculated to be $40 I found a hotel room that was like a jail cell—narrow and dark, with a dim light fifteen feet high on the ceiling. There was no bathroom. The bed was the size of a camp cot. Perhaps if I had just spent three months on an oil rig I would not have noticed how dismal it was. But I had been in other parts of Scotland, where they did things differently, and I knew I was being fleeced.

  To cheer myself up I decided to go out on the town. I found a joint called Happy Valley—loud music and screams. I thought: Just the ticket.

  But the doorman blocked my path and said, "Sorry, you can't go in."

  Behind him were jumping, sweating people and the occasional splash of breaking glass.

  "You've not got a jacket and tie," he said.

  I could not believe this. I looked past him, into the pandemonium.

  "There's a man in there with no shirt," I said.

  "You'll have to go, mate."

  I suspected that it was my oily hiker's shoes that he really objected to, and I hated him for it.

  I said, "At least I'm wearing a shirt."

  He made a monkey noise and shortened his neck. "I'm telling you for the last time."

  "Okay, I'm going. I just want to say one thing," I said. "You're wearing one of the ugliest neckties I've ever seen in my life."

  Up the street another joint was advertising "Country and Western Night." I hurried up the stairs, toward the fiddling.

  "Ye canna go in," the doorman said. "It's too full."

  "I see people going in," I said. They were drifting past me.

  "And we're closing in a wee munnit."

  I said, "I don't mind."

  "And you're wearing blue jeans," he said.

  "And you're wearing a wrinkled jacket," I said. "And what's that, a gravy stain?"

  "Ye canna wear blue jeans here. Regulations."

  "Are you serious? I can't wear blue jeans to an evening of country and western music?"

  "Ye canna."

  I said, "How do you know I'm not Willie Nelson?"

  He jabbed me hard with his stubby finger and said, "You're nae Wullie Nullson, now piss off!"

  And so I began to think that Aberdeen was not my kind of place. But was it anyone's kind of place? It was fully employed and tidy and virtuous, but it was just as bad as any of the poverty-stricken places I had seen—worse, really, because it had no excuses. The food was disgusting, the hotels overpriced and indifferent, the spit-and-sawdust pubs were full of drunken and bad-tempered men—well,
who wouldn't be? And it was not merely that it was expensive and dull; much worse was its selfishness. Again, it was the boom town ego. Nothing else mattered but its municipal affairs. The newspapers ignored the Israeli invasion of Lebanon and the United Nations initiative on the Falklands and the new space shuttle. Instead, their headlines concentrated on the local moneymaking stuff—the new industries, the North Sea pipeline about to be laid, the latest oil rigs. The world hardly existed, but financial news, used cars, and real estate took up seven pages of the daily paper.

  The Aberdeen American, a fortnightly paper, had the self-conscious gusto of a church newsletter. It was a hotchpotch of news about barbecues, schools, American primary elections, and features with an Anglo-American connection. It was a reminder that the American community in Aberdeen was large. The American School had three premises. I heard American voices on the buses. And I was certain that it was the Americans who patronized the new health clubs—weight-loss emporiums and gymnasiums with wall-to-wall carpets. A lovely granite church had been gutted and turned into the Nautilus Total Fitness Centre.

  On a quiet street in the western part of the city was the American Foodstore. I went there out of curiosity, wondering what sort of food Americans viewed as essential to their well-being on this savage shore. My findings were: Crisco, Thousand Island Dressing, Skippy Peanut Butter, Cheerios, Pepperidge Farm Frozen Blueberry Muffins, Bama Brand Grape Jelly, Mama's Frozen Pizza, Swanson's Frozen Turkey TV Dinner, Chef Boyardee Spaghetti Sauce, El Paso Taco Sauce, and Vermont Pancake Syrup. I also noted stacks of Charmin Toilet Paper, Budweiser Beer, and twenty-five-pound bags of Purina Dog Chow.

  None of it was good food, and it was all vastly inferior to the food obtainable locally, which cost less than half as much. But my experience of Aberdeen had shown me that foreigners were treated with suspicion, and it was quite understandable that there was a sense of solidarity to be had from being brand-loyal. Crisco and Skippy were part of being an American—and, in the end, so was Charmin Toilet Paper. I imagined that to an American in Aberdeen imported frozen pizza was more than a cultural necessity—it was also a form of revenge.

  "Isn't there anything you like about Aberdeen?" Mr. Muir asked imploringly, as we waited on the platform at Guild Street Station for the train to Dundee. I had spent ten minutes enumerating my objections, and I had finished by saying that I never wanted to see another boom town again. What about the cathedral, the university, the museum—hadn't I thought the world of them?

  "No," I said.

  He looked appalled.

  I said, "But I liked the bakeries. The fresh fish. The cheese."

  "The bakeries," Mr. Muir said sadly.

  I did not go on. He thought there was something wrong with me. But what I liked in Aberdeen was what I liked generally in Britain: the bread, the fish, the cheese, the flower gardens, the apples, the clouds, the newspapers, the beer, the woolen cloth, the radio programs, the parks, the Indian restaurants and amateur dramatics, the postal service, the fresh vegetables, the trains, and the modesty and truthfulness of people. And I liked the way Aberdeen's streets were frequently full of seagulls.

  21. The 9:51 to Leuchars Junction

  IT WAS a mild meadowy coast for seventy miles, from the mouth of the Dee to the mouth of the Tay—Aberdeen to Dundee. I had hoped to walk part of it, keeping to the clifftops and avoiding the deep cuts and gullies and the dark promontories. I liked the way the shaggy grass hung into the coves from the cliff edge. Today that grass was streaming and even the sea was flattened by the falling rain. The storm brightened the stone on the snug coastal cottages and gave it the color of snail shells.

  Stonehaven was visibly prosperous, which was odd, because most well-off Scottish towns tried to hide their prosperity. We skirted the town's pretty bay, turned inland for perhaps twenty miles, and then returned to the coast at Montrose, which lay on a landspit in front of a large tidal lagoon, Montrose Basin. Slouching cows searched for grass near the apartment houses at Montrose, and farther south at Lunan Bay a hundred hogs in the field were suddenly illuminated by a gleam of sunshine through the draperies of the downpour. The light also reddened a nearby castle ruin and briefly warmed the sands of the bay.

  The gale surged again, with mares' tails off Arbroath, and it swept across the Front. But I imagined it to be a joyless place even in full sunshine. The coast had turned duney. In Scotland it was either black cliffs or gray links, and sometimes for miles it was bleak attenuated golf courses, end to end in the sand. Scottish golf courses were never pretty things: they were windy and lacked topsoil; they were oddly lumpy, scattered with rabbit holes and bomb craters; they looked like minefields. Carnoustie was that way—battlescarred—and so was Barry. And then we came to Monifieth, where three tall swans were swimming in the sea.

  I chose to stop at Dundee because it had a reputation for dullness ("possesses little of interest for the tourist"). Such places were usually worth seeing. I had found that in Britain less was revealed by the lovely old town than the ugly new one. Old Dundee had been destroyed, and new Dundee was an interesting monstrosity. It was certainly an excellent example of a hard-edged horror—the prison-like city of stony-faced order—that I associated with the future. Just the word futuristic brought to my mind the most depressing images of idle crowds and ugly buildings, unfriendly streets, steel fences, barred windows, and defoliation; and it was bound up with the concept of organized leisure—the intimidating symmetry of group fun. Public swimming pools were futuristic.

  There had always seemed to me something uncomfortable and dangerous about public swimming pools. Their tiles had a particularly frightening way of turning a shout into a scream, and this noise and the water and the cold showers and the nakedness could make a swimming pool seem like Auschwitz. Rowdy gangs loved to swim—the atmosphere of a pool brought out a bullying streak in them.

  The Dundee Swimming and Leisure Centre had the look of a Russian interrogation headquarters, a vast drab Lubyanka in rain-streaked concrete. Inside were three crowded pools, and one was Olympic-sized. They contained a stew of thousands of screaming kids. The building smelled of human flesh and disinfectant; it steamed like a locker room; it was damp in a sickening way. It had a dark cafeteria and a Therapy Suite containing sunlamps and sauna baths ("OAP's Sauna—80 pence"). There were a number of Ping-Pong tables in one room, but no one was playing. In the lobby there were four electronic games being frantically played—boys feeding money into Space Invaders and Frogger and Moon Landing while the single parents and the pensioners and the unemployed came and went. It was in the metropolitan plan, in a world where there was no work and no money but plenty of time; it was part of the process of life in the years to come.

  ***

  Leuchars Junction was no longer a junction, though the name had stuck. It lay across the Firth of Tay, in Fife. It was as near as I could get by rail to St. Andrews ("perhaps the most fashionable watering place in the country"), and I began walking as soon as I arrived at the station.

  After a mile or so I came to Guardbridge. Some men were standing in front of the paper mill there. They said they were waiting for a funeral to go past—a man who had worked his whole life at the paper mill was being buried today. The hearse was overdue.

  "And I'll tell you something," one of the men said. His name was Gordon Hastie and he was fairly agitated, twisting his cloth cap in his hands as he peered up the St. Andrews Road. "Do you see those flags?"

  There were three on the flagpoles in front of the factory—a Union Jack, the Scottish national flag, and what I took to be the paper mill's own flag—all flying at half-mast.

  "What a morning it's been," Mr. Hastie said. "A couple of hours ago we had to raise those flags for Queenie. Then after she went by we had to lower them again for Donald."

  Donald was the dead man, obviously, but who was Queenie?

  "The Queen herself," Mr. Hastie said. "Aye."

  "You mean the Queen's here?"

  "In St. Andrews," Mr. Hastie sai
d. "Hurry up, you might see her."

  Just as I started to run, Donald's hearse went by. I froze. The paper mill men doffed their caps. And then the funeral cars continued down the wet road, and the men went back to work.

  It was four miles more to St. Andrews. I walked fast and after a few miles I cut across a field, continuing along the estuary of the River Eden, ending up in the middle of a golf course. There were four golf courses here, but the one I found myself in belonged to the Royal and Ancient Golf Club of St. Andrews, the capital of the golfing world. The course was just as rough and desolate as every other one I had seen in Scotland. Perhaps that was the point of golf?

  But there was not a town its size in Britain to compare with St. Andrews, and it was one of the most beautiful towns on the coast, the white stone ruins and the brown stone buildings perched on the rocky cliffs of a wide bay. The golf courses ran into the seafront, and the seafront was part of the playing fields of the university, which was a third of the town; but it was impossible to tell where one ended and the other began. The whole effect was somewhat ecclesiastical, but with fresh air, like a lively cloister with the roof off.

  Today the streets were scrubbed, flags flew, the whole town gleamed with flowers and bunting. And there was a heightened hum, a vibration racing in the air, the equivalent in sound of twinkling light, something electric and almost visible. It was genuine. I felt it as soon as I entered the cobbled streets. It was as if the town had been refreshed with a blessing. In a way it had, for that atmosphere was the spirit left by the progress of the Royal Visit. The Queen of England had left just a moment ago.

  "What a pity you missed her," Freda Robertson said. Mrs. Robertson owned the largest bookstore in St. Andrews, and she looked dignified and indestructible in her Scottish way, her voice half-inquiry and half-reprimand and full of the precise ironies of a headmistress. She loved books. She recognized me. Did I want a cup of tea?