The Kingdom by the Sea

by Paul Theroux

  With her finger tracing upon the sharp panes of her mullioned window, Mrs. Robertson described how Her Majesty rode up here in her Rolls-Royce, and got out there, and walked over there near the barriers.

  "I hung out of the window with a pair of binoculars and my camera," Mrs. Robertson said. "I didn't know which one to look through. I'm sure my pictures will have fingers and thumbs on them. But you should have heard the cheers!"

  Was this Falklands feeling, I wondered? No, Freda Robertson said, it was for the Queen's being a grandmother. The child had been born when I was in Mallaig, and now he had a name: Prince William. One of the largest St. Andrews signs said, health to PRINCE WILLIAM.

  "What brings you to St. Andrews?" Mrs. Robertson asked.

  I said that I was making my way around the British coast, clockwise.

  "Aye, so we're on your itinerary."

  "And a man in Guardbridge told me that the Queen was here."

  It was then that Mrs. Robertson said what a pity it was that I had missed her. "Her Majesty just left for Anstruther."

  That was only eight miles away and also on the coast.

  I said, "I think I'll go to Anstruther and see her."

  "I hope you do see her," Mrs. Robertson said. "This is a great occasion. Do you know that this is the first time the Queen and Prince Philip have ever come to St. Andrews?"

  "Ever?"

  "Aye," Mrs. Robertson said. "Now I want you to do me one favor, if you will."

  "Gladly," I said.

  She went on, "As you're traveling around the British coast, so you say, you are seeing a great many places. I have never been to half those places, and I don't suppose I shall. What I want you to do is write me a nonfiction book about traveling around the British coast. I think it would do very well in my shop, but that's not the important thing. I mean to say, I want to read it."

  I said I would do my best, and started toward Anstruther, thinking: That was a page, and here's another page, and there's probably a page in Anstruther.

  I tried to hitchhike in order to get to Anstruther in time to see the Queen, but no one picked me up. I fell in with a farm laborer on the road. He was coming from St. Andrews. He had gone there for the Royal Visit.

  "I saw the Queen," he said, and he winced, remembering.

  "How did she look?"

  He winced again. His name was Dougie. He wore gumboots. He said, "She were deep in thought."

  Dougie had seen something no one else had.

  "She were preoccupied. Her face were gray. She weren't happy."

  I said, "I thought she was happy about her new grandson."

  Dougie disagreed. "I think she were worried about something. They do worry, you know. Aye, it's a terrible job."

  He began to walk slowly, as if in sympathy for the hard-pressed Queen.

  I said, "Being Queen of England has its compensations."

  "Some compensations and some disadvantages," Dougie said. "I say it's half a dream world and half a nightmare. It's a goldfish bowl. No privacy! She can't pick her nose without someone seeing her."

  Dougie said this in an anguished way, and I thought it was curious, though I did not say so, that he was pained because the monarch could not pick her nose without being observed.

  He then began to talk about television programs. He said his favorite program was "The Dukes of Hazzard," which concerned hijinks in a town in the American South. This Scottish farm laborer in Fifeshire said that he liked it because of the way the character Roscoe talked to his boss. That was very funny. American humor was hard to understand at times, he said, but every farm laborer in Scotland would find Roscoe funny for his attitude.

  At last a bus came. I flagged it down. It was empty. I said I wanted to go to Anstruther to see the Queen.

  "Aye. She's having lunch there," the driver said.

  I wondered where.

  The driver knew. "At the Craw's Nest. It's a small hotel on the Pittenweem Road."

  He dropped me farther along and I followed the bunting into Anstruther, sensing that same vibrant glow that I had felt at St. Andrews—the royal buzz. It was a holiday atmosphere. The schools were out. The shops were closed. The pubs were open. Some men were wearing kilts. People were talking in groups, seeming to remind each other of what had just happened—the Queen had already gone by, to the Craw's Nest.

  I cut across the harbor sands and went up the road to what seemed a very ordinary hotel—but freshly painted and draped in lines of plastic Union Jacks. There were more men in kilts here—they had such wonderfully upright posture, the men in kilts: they never slouched and hardly ever sat down.

  "She just left," one said. His name was Hector Hay McKaye.

  But there was something of her still here, like perfume that is strongest when a woman leaves suddenly. In the Queen's case it was like something overhead—still up there, an echo.

  Mr. McKaye turned to his friends and said, "They had two detectives in the kitchen—"

  "Do you want to see the flowers?" Mrs. Hamilton said.

  Everyone was whispering excitedly.

  It seemed to me that if the Queen and Prince Philip had eaten here, the food might be good. I seldom had a good meal in my traveling, not that it mattered much: food was one of the dullest subjects. I decided to stay the night at the Craw's Nest. And this hotel, which had just received the blessing of a Royal Visit, was a great deal cheaper than any hotel in Aberdeen.

  "She never had a starter," the waitress Eira said. "She had the fish course, haddock Mornay. Then roast beef, broccoli, and carrots. And fresh strawberries and cream for dessert. Our own chef did it. It was a simple meal—it was good. The menu was printed and had bits of gold foil around it."

  Much was made of the good plain food. It was English food—a fish course, a roast, two boiled vegetables, and fruit for the sweet course. The middle-class families in Anstruther—and everywhere else—had that every Sunday for lunch. She's just like us, people said of the Queen; of course, she works a jolly sight harder!

  What was difficult for an alien to see was that this was essentially a middle-class monarchy. Decent philistines, the royal couple liked animals and country-house sports and variety shows. They never mentioned books at all, but they were famous for preferring certain television programs. Newspapers had published photographs of the Royal Television Set: it had a big screen and a sort of shawl on the top, but it was just like one you could hire for two quid a week up the High Street. Over the years the Queen had become shrewder-seeming, an even-tempered mother-in-law and a kindly gran. Prince Philip was loved for being irascible. He was noted for his grouchy remarks. He used the word bloody in public, and after that it was hard for anyone to find fault with him. The Queen was his opposite, growing smaller and squashier as he seemed to lengthen and grow spiky—the illusion had sprung out of his having become vocal. The Queen and the Prince were well-matched, but it was less the sovereign and her consort than the double-act that all successful middle-class marriages are.

  In the lobby they were selling souvenirs of the Royal Visit. How had they had time to prepare these paperweights and medallions and letter openers and postcards saying Craw's Nest Hotel—Souvenir of the Royal Visit?

  "We knew about it in January, but we had to keep it a secret until May," Eira said. "We kept praying that nothing would go wrong. We thought the Falklands might finish it."

  So they had been putting the place in order and running up souvenirs for almost seven months. The royal lunch had lasted an hour.

  That night they held a celebration party in the hotel parking lot. It was a way of giving thanks. The hotel invited the whole town, or rather two—Easter Anstruther and Wester Anstruther. They had a rock band and eight pipers and some drummers. The racket was tremendous and continued until two o'clock in the morning, hundreds of people drinking and dancing. They sold sausages and fish and chips, and there were bales of hay for people to sit on. The band was bad, but no one seemed to mind. There were old people, families, drunks, and d
ogs. Small boys smoked cigarettes in a delighted way and sneaked beer from the hotel. Girls danced with each other, because the village boys, too embarrassed to be seen dancing, congregated in small groups and pretended to be tough. There was a good feeling in the air, hilarity and joy, something festive, but also grateful and exhausted. It wasn't faked; it was like the atmosphere of an African village enjoying itself.

  At eleven I took a walk down to the beach. I passed a man in rubber waders standing alone and looking puzzled on the road. A girl and her grandmother were eating ice cream cones in the half-dark. I passed a cottage; inside, a family of five was singing out loud. I saw more children smoking behind a wall. In another house a man and woman seemed to be proposing a toast. There was moonlight on the water, and this moonglow had settled on the waves and made them stand out like the ribs of a washboard. I walked toward this light, and on the stony beach, just below the seawall where I was standing, a boy was clumsily fucking a girl, his buttocks plum-blue under the bright moon and her upraised legs almost luminous and seeming to steady him. It was chilly, he was having a little trouble, but he was so eager, he did not see me. They made me feel invisible, but I left them there and I thought of the band and the dancing and beer and the hay bales and the moonlight and the smell of seaweed and the young couple fucking where the Queen had just been—it was like a mural, an allegorical painting, but a funny one, a Gully Jimson or a Stanley Spencer.

  The cleaning ladies were buzzing early the next morning.

  "I couldn't believe it," Mrs. Ross said. "It didn't seem real. It was like a dream."

  I said, "What will Willie Hamilton think?"

  Willie Hamilton was their Member of Parliament and noted for being in favor of abolishing the monarchy.

  "Willie Hamilton can get stuffed."

  After breakfast, I set off for Leven. It was a gray morning, and rather chilly. After I had walked a few miles, it began to rain. I kept walking and heard a throstle, as it was called here. Then the rain was too much for me. I hurried to a village and waited for the bus to Leven. The villages on the coast of Fife had a quiet beauty, and the farmhouses and barns were built like fortresses in flat stone.

  On the way to Leven we stopped at Largo. "Alexander Selkirk, the original of Robinson Crusoe, was born here in 1676." There was a statue of Selkirk in front of his birthplace, a cottage in Lower Largo.

  "Its proper name is the Seatoun of Largo," a man next to me said. He had just boarded the bus, and we began talking about Largo and Selkirk. The man said, "Alexander Selkirk was a rogue! He was no good at all!"

  I said that I had read somewhere that Selkirk had once kicked his mother and father downstairs.

  "Aye, a rogue," the man said. "And I'm a direct descendant of his, on my mother's side of the family."

  The man's name was David Gillis. He was ninety years old. It seemed my fate to be quite often encountering very old men. But it was these buses and trains—the old men didn't drive, didn't own cars, and I ran into them traveling. I was glad of it. David Gillis was bright-eyed and his hearing was fine. He could have been seventy or so. He was going to Leven to do a little shopping.

  I was always interested to know what work these people had done. What had Gillis done seventy-five years ago, at the age of fifteen?

  "I was apprenticed to a plumber in Largo and earned half a crown a week"—about twenty cents. "But it wasn't just plumbing I had to learn—all plumbers were tinsmiths and bell-hangers. I got my first job in 1906. I was offered a pound a week by a man in Largo, but I turned it down. I went to Glasgow and got two pounds. You see, the country employers used to take advantage of us."

  He stayed in Glasgow for some years and eventually went to London, where his skills were in demand.

  "Nowadays, plumbing is easy. You put in the pipes and the pump does all the work. But in those days we didn't have pumps. That made it very tricky work, because the flow had to be just right. And bell-hanging was a delicate thing. There was a bell in every room in the big houses. They worked on wires—no electrics at all. Bing went the bell and it would register on a panel downstairs, where the servants were. Bell-hanging was quite an art. No one does it now."

  In 1941, Mr. Gillis' doctor in London said, "If you want your wife to live, you'll get her out of here." Her nerves were bad, and German bombs were tearing into the city. People asked him why he had come back to Largo, but he always said that if they spent two nights together in London with those bombs, they wouldn't ask.

  In the mid-sixties the railway to Largo closed. It was the worst thing that had ever happened in this part of Fife. The end of the railway was the end of the village.

  "It was a terrible thing," Mr. Gillis said. "Now we're twelve miles from a railway station, and the bus is awful. Some days it doesn't come at all. And it's getting worse. If I miss the bus, I have to wait hours in Leven. And there's nothing to do there—Leven is more dead than alive."

  There had been a railway through Largo and all the way to Crail and St. Andrews, Mr. Gillis said. The buses had not replaced it, and who had the money to run a car?

  Mr. Gillis, at ninety, was surprised at how slow and difficult it was for anyone to get from place to place these days. Years ago it had been very easy.

  He confirmed my feeling that great parts of Britain were turning into what they were before the railway age. Villages were becoming crabbed and shrunken, and businesses were closing, and the people who stayed in rural areas became more and more tied to their houses. The urban areas were growing in population and becoming poorer, like Leven, the last stop. Areas of high unemployment like this had a distinctively sooty look and woeful air—not much traffic but plenty of people on the sidewalks. In these poor towns the people walked rather slowly.

  In a report on Kirkcaldy, eight miles farther along the coast, half the sample of unemployed people described "wandering along the High Street" as a regular activity. They did not leave Kirkcaldy ("birthplace of Adam Smith, author of The Wealth of Nations"), because bus fares were too high. They could not afford to look for jobs elsewhere. I had bought a copy of this report. It was called Biding Time and subtitled "Reflections of unemployed young people in Kirkcaldy, 1982." Reflections was the wrong word. They were not particularly alarmed by the lack of work available. Unemployment was so common, there was no stigma attached to it; it was accepted as a permanent condition. The report noted that few of the young people expressed a "desperate willingness to do 'anything.'" There was always the dole and, for pleasure, the High Street to wander along. And while several were angry at their inability to find jobs, others had their own solutions: "One person was thinking about emigrating; one expected a prison sentence soon..."

  I had passed East and West Wemyss ("so called because of the numerous large 'weems' or caves... along this coast") and some defunct coal fields. I would have stayed in Kirkcaldy if it had seemed a desperate place, but it was more dull than desperate. I made a tour of the town and then continued past the small windy resort at Burnt-island and along canyons of junk and discarded cars near the cliffs at Inverkeithing. But this junkyard was also part of the embankment of the Firth of Forth, and if you turned your back on this ramshackle shore, which was like a mortal wound in Scotland's side, there was a grand view of ships and water and the Forth Bridge.

  Edinburgh was the next stop, but it was not on my coastal itinerary. It was, in atmosphere, an inland city, and now that the port of Leith was moribund, it hardly counted as important to shipping. But it was a handsome place still, a city of black crags and old solemn tenements of slate rising to a castle that looked like a dark drum on a cliff. Wind gusted up its steep alleys. What was now grass and railway tracks in a ravine beside Princes Street had once been a loch. It was the most beautiful city in Britain and one of the must-beautiful in Europe. It looked as if it were the setting of great intrigues and passionate vice, but I knew it to be a quiet indoor city inhabited by private souls who lived in narrow seclusion.

  In Edinburgh I was told that a railway
strike was looming and that in three or four days there would not be a single train running in Britain. This event was not viewed with much passion by the general public. The sort of punishing strike that created misery in other countries was met in Britain with either excitement—a kind of community thrill at the drama of it—or else indifference. The British were fatalistic; it was the origin of their cynicism, but it also made them good sharers of misfortune. "Oh, well, mustn't grumble!"

  I hurried to North Berwick, which lay on a corner of land between the Firth of Forth and the North Sea, and from here I walked to Dunbar, spending a whole day making detours. I had seen Dunbar from the train as it sped by, and I had liked the look of it, so I took this chance to stop there. The harbor was on a bleak and rocky bay, faced by rotting ramparts and collapsing red stone walls. The old buildings in Dunbar were also made of this red stone and the High Street was fifty yards wide. But it was a lifeless place and a little sad on this cold day in July. I debated whether to stay the night or head for the border. On these long summer evenings there was always plenty of time to decide.

  I was reluctant to leave Scotland—I had liked nearly everyone I had met. But then in Dunbar I met a loudmouth named Billy Crombie. He was traveling south and had stopped to drink three pints of beer. He was a Glaswegian, with a mustache as large as a ferret and a cowering wife. His face was purple; he drove a Jaguar.

  "I'm going to a foreign country!" he declared. "Aye, England—it's a foreign land! Scotland's ruled by the bloody English. They dropped Exchange Control so that they could spend our money abroad—they don't spend it in Scotland, though they stole it from us in the first place by stealing our oil resairves. And you bloody Yanks have atomic bombs a few miles from Glasgow, and nuclear subs in Holy Loch! Why don't you put them in London, that's what I want to know. Don't mention politicians. They're beyond a joke. David Steel is a Unionist! Tam Dalyell is a carpetbagger! Jenkins is a Tory—it was an Orange seat and they ran a Catholic to oppose him—how could he lose? I'm a freedom fighter—don't let these tweeds fool you. You can ask my wife, if you don't believe I'm a freedom fighter. Now, listen, go home and tell them we don't want your bombs!"