The Kingdom by the Sea

by Paul Theroux

  That was how she talked, slowly and methodically fracturing her words. "If you nee dennythink, just say so," she said, and "Toffees—do you wan tenny?" She said she cooked "everthin gone that menu" and that Sid helped with "the washin gup." She said I could settle my bill on the "morny gov departure" and that I could take my room key with me if I was "goin gout."

  I was the only guest in their twenty-room hotel. "A lot of people left yesterday," Mr. Horswill said. "If it's not the strike, it's the killer. They were getting nervy." But I peeked into the register. Only one couple had been there in the past five days, the Hallwarks from Darlington. So Sid was just trying to put up a good front. Things will pick up next month, these hotel people always said. But it did not seem likely, and it could be creepy, having a meal alone in a dining room with nineteen empty tables. It was like Lahore at Ramadhan.

  The Horswills had given me the smallest room in the place. I had asked for a single. This was a literal-minded country and not given to the expansive gesture. I was three flights up, in the back, one of the few five-pounders, and every other room was empty.

  The weather turned bad on my second day. Whitby people claimed that the weather was always much worse north of here—in Newcastle and Berwick. Mrs. Horswill told me how, a month ago, a woman had been walking along the breakwater extension ot the harbor, and a gale sprang up and swept the woman into the sea.

  "They spen tevver so much time looking for her, and when they found her, she were naked. The sea were so rough, it strip toff all her clothes."

  Mrs. Horswill was a little morbid on this subject. She kept track' of the Whitby lifeboat, its comings and goings, its rescues and disasters, how many saved, how many drowned, and whether they were British. She sat at the window of her hotel on the cliff, always watching and usually knitting.

  "Lifeboat's goin gout," she said.

  It returned empty, she reported.

  "Lifeboat's goin gout again," she said an hour later, and in the same breath, "'A Tribute to Frank Sinatra,'" and smiled at the television screen.

  They loved him in England, the older folk. In places like Uggle barnby they knew all the words to "Chicago." American crooners were very popular: Bing Crosby, Perry Como, and singers I had never heard of, and of the most obscure they would say, "Of course his grandmother was English." And dancers—Fred Astaire, Ginger Rogers; and figure skaters—they knew the names of the American ones ("Bert and Betty Woofter—ever so graceful—they won a gold at Husqvarna"). And corny American musicals, and "Dallas," and Dixieland jazz; and in the depths of the English countryside country and western music was popular, the farm laborers had side-burns, and sometimes one saw—as I did in Whitby—a man of forty with a tattoo on his arm reading Elvis the King—R.I.P.

  The day before I left Whitby I was sitting on a bench, staring in the direction of the beautiful ruined abbey, and a woman of about fifty, with a bow-legged dog, sat down and we started talking. Her name was Mrs. Lettsom and she had a boardinghouse in Whitby, but her real ambition was to move to Sandsend, a mile up the coast.

  "The houses there are smashing," Mrs. Lettsom said. "They say the people are posh," she added sadly, "but I don't mind."

  A three-bedroom house in Whitby cost about £22,000, and in Sandsend £34,000.

  "But it's a dream," Mrs. Lettsom said. "I'll never have that kind of money." She was looking in the direction of Sandsend. Then she turned to me and said, "So what do you think about this bloke, going around killing people?"

  ***

  I decided to walk to Scarborough, about twenty miles down the coast, on a footpath called the Cleveland Way. I slipped out of Horswill Heights, crossed the harbor, and climbed the stairs up East Cliff, where in Dracula Lucy Westenra ("I was waked by a flapping at the window") went sleep-walking and got the horrors. Now instead of a vampire there was a tent and caravan site there at Salt-wick Nab. It was not messy, but it was very ugly, and it occurred to me that such places were reduplications in canvas and tin of the neighborhoods the people had left, little canvas Smethwicks and tin Pudseys jammed together, with a pub, a shop, and a video shed in the center.

  The coast was littered with black wrecks and stoved-in hulks, and this path had cracks in it—parts of it had already fallen into the sea, a hundred feet down.

  There was a young woman ahead of me, walking alone but moving briskly. When I came abreast of her she asked me the time, and I took this to mean that she would not mind talking to me. Her name was Hazel, she was thirty, and she was walking to Robin Hood's Bay just for the hell of it. She had red cheeks and freckles; she was a jogger; her husband was in a fishing competition in Whitby. She was not interested in fishing (I never saw a woman in Britain holding either a fishing rod or a cricket bat). She had been married for two months.

  "I live a strange life," she said.

  I was delighted to hear this, but when she explained, it did not seem so strange. Both she and her husband worked at night, eight-thirty in the evening until six-thirty in the morning, four ten-hour days and then a long weekend, Friday to Sunday. Henry worked in maintenance, and she was a cook in the staff cafeteria—head cook, actually—and she had been doing the job for six years.

  The workers who ate in the cafeteria had a very tough union. Once they had threatened a strike over the food.

  "I decided that we were wasting too much food," Hazel said. "So I changed the menu—two main dishes and two sweets. The men moaned, 'We'll go out on strike'—all that lark. The shop steward came to me and insisted that the night workers get the same four main dishes and four sweets—two hot sweets and two cold—that the day workers got. So that's what we have now, four main dishes, because the union says so. And we're back to wasting food. If one of the choices runs out, they abuse me. They get a full breakfast, too. They're well looked after. It's an American company."

  Did she like working for an American company?

  "In some ways they're just like the English," she said. "The management give themselves big fancy cars as perks. They don't need the cars for their work. They travel to work in them, same as we do. It makes me mad."

  She cooked for seventy men. Cooking for two people was easy. She didn't understand people who complained about it. But she wished she got outside more. She wanted to do more running, perhaps run a fast marathon—she could do four hours and ten minutes, but that wasn't good enough. Henry always wanted to play Scrabble, but they had terrible rows when they played.

  "This is what I like," she said, as we rounded the bluff called North Cheek. "This is fun."

  But the cliffs were falling into the sea, and in places there were big bites out of the path and a detour through a wheatfield or under a fence. On certain stretches, I thought: This path won't be here next year.

  Hazel was silent for a while, and then she said, "I wonder what's going to happen."

  What was she talking about?

  She said, "I read somewhere that they're closing down whole towns in Canada."

  At Robin Hood's Bay ("a quaint irregular fishing village on a steep slope") I bought Hazel a drink and then set off alone along the bushy cliffs and lumpy green headlands. At Ravenscar there were shrieking schoolchildren. One said, "They just shot that bloke!" I knew exactly who the dead man was. Sometimes it was not like a country at all, but rather a small parish.

  23. Disused Railway Line

  HIKING SOUTH on the teetering coastal path toward Scarborough, I took a wrong turn and stumbled onto a gravelly lane. It led in a wide straight way through the woods. It was so impressively useless a thoroughfare, I looked for it on my map. This sort of landscape feature was sometimes labeled Roman road (course of), and indicated by a broken line. But just as often it was identified as Disused Railway Line, and seemed just as ancient and just as derelict as a Roman road.

  This thing had been part of the North-Eastern Railway, between Whitby and Scarborough. "The line skirts the coast, affording views of the sea to the right," the old guidebooks had said. But now there were only two alter
natives: the footpath that was falling into the sea, and Route A-171, a dangerous speedway of dinky cars and whining motorbikes. And the railway had been turned into a bridle path—a degenerate step, since the railway had itself replaced the mounted traveler, the coach and four, and the horse bus.

  The railway had not been profitable, only useful. And now, after a century's interruption of technology, horses had repossessed the route. I had seen this all over Britain—defunct viaducts, abandoned cuttings, former railway stations, ruined railway bridges—and I thought of all the lost hopes and all the wasted effort. Then, small dismantled England seemed simple and underdeveloped—and too mean to save herself—deceived by her own frugality.

  I continued down the Disused Railway Line, marveling at the stupidity of it. They started by closing stations; then they cut the number of trains; then, with few trains and a reduced service, they could prove the line was losing money and not worth keeping; and then the line was closed for good and the tracks sold as scrap iron. And then it belonged to Ramblers and hackers; it was where people took their dogs to shit.

  It was like a ghastly parody of hard times. In what had been the greatest railway country in the world, and the easiest and cheapest to traverse, the traveler was now told with perfect seriousness, "You can't get there from here."

  This was a wonderful thing for my circular tour, because parts of Britain that had been frequented by travelers for hundreds of years had now become inaccessible, and what had been villages well served by railway lines had become curiously anorexic-looking and tumble-down, somehow deserving the epitaph from "Ozymandias." I had thought traveling around Britain would be a breeze; without a car it was often very difficult, but it revealed to me long coastal stretches of unexpected decrepitude.

  It sometimes looked the reverse, yet it was decrepitude all the same. One such sight—one of the saddest and most irritating for me in Britain—was the railway station that had been auctioned off and sold to an up-and-comer who had turned it into a bijou bungalow. I found these maddening: the superbly solid Victorian railway architecture now the merest forcing house for geraniums and cats—Nigel and Jenny Bankler ("We're planning to start a baby") presently hogging the whole premises that used to be the station building at Applecross. "That was the waiting room, where Jenny has the breakfast nook, and do you see that funny little window thing, where there's that magnificent jar of muesli? Well, years ago, that was the—" Nigel wanted to call it Couplings, because the weekends they used it (their proper house was a semi in Cheadle), Jenny was practically insatiable. In the end they settled for the Sidings. Most of the other stations had become second homes. Foot-plate Cottage and Level Crossing and Dunrailing were right up the line, and one still had its original ticket window and grille (the Nordleys had trained some variegated ivy up it—looked smashing). "We got this place for practically nothing," they always said. "Mind you, we've put a fair bit of money into it," and then—with a jowly little grin—"We've always liked trains. Haven't we, Petal?"

  I could not see one of these railway station bungalows and the owner-occupiers without thinking of Planet of the Apes. And now that the railway strike had started, I could foresee a time when every railway line would be turned into a cinder track for dog-owners and horse-lovers, and all the stations into bungalows. Thousands of miles of railway had already gone that way—why not the rest of it? Many of these lines had been closed by the Beeching Report of 1963. While I was traveling around the coast in the spring and summer of 1982, a new report on British Railways was being written. This was the Serpell Report, offering several options. Option A, greatly favored by the powerful road lobby, slashed the railway network from eleven thousand to sixteen hundred miles, leaving a skeleton service on the rails, and created a traffic jam on the roads that extended from John O'Groats to Land's End.

  This trackless railway line took me into Scarborough.

  ***

  Scarborough was the most complete seaside resort I had seen so far in Britain. It was a big full-blooded place, three hundred feet up on a part of the coast that was a geological freak. A buckling during the Jurassic period had given Scarborough a Front like a human face—two bays like eye sockets and the bluff between like a great nose of oolite. (It was a fact that people tended to settle those parts of the coast that had huge and recognizably human features—and the settlers even gave those features anatomical names.) Scarborough had theaters and concert halls and department stores; its ledges and steeps were lined with boardinghouses. The town had the same ample contours as its landladies, and the same sense of life in which even platitudes were delivered with gusto. "The biggest fool to a workingman these days is hisself!" The butchers wore straw boaters and blood-stained smocks, and among their sausages and black puddings were braces of pigeons still wearing feathers. On a coast in which one place was turned into a holiday camp and another was declared bankrupt and a third was sliding into the sea, Scarborough seemed, if not eternal, at least busy, prosperous, and alive.

  When a British coastal place was modernized, it seemed to strangle on its own novelty. Scarborough had sensibly remained unchanged, and even its entertainments were antique. It was praised for having good theater, notably Alan Ayckbourne's playhouse—Mr. Ayckbourne was a local resident. But live plays were nothing new in a seaside resort—they were as old a virtue as the music halls and the bandstand concerts, and the end-of-the-pier shows.

  At the Floral Hall on the clifftop above North Bay I went to see An Evening of Viennese Operetta, put on by the Scarborough Light Opera Society. The English were such brave and unembarrassed amateurs! They loved graceful waltzers, the ladies in ball gowns, the men in tuxedos; perfumed tits, violins, and gliding feet.

  "The year is 1850—and Vienna is the city of dreams," John Beagle said as the curtain rose, and the violins swelled under the baton of Gordon Truefitt.

  It was "The Blue Danube"! Two pairs of dancers, Maureen Bosomworth and Albert Marston, and the Pobgees—Elizabeth and Malcolm—swept across the floor. Die Fledermaus was next, Eunice Cockburn singing "The Laughing Song." And there was more: Gypsy songs, polkas, more violins. "My Hero," "The Gold and Silver Waltz," "Girls Were Made to Love and Kiss" ("And who am I to interfere with this?") and Maureen Bosomworth changed her gown for every new number. They ran through Franz Lehar, and then we had Sigmund Romberg's "Golden Days" and selections from "The Dancing Years" by Ivor Novello. The hall was full. "You Are My Heart's Delight" brought forth grateful applause, and the selections from Bitter Sweet, especially "I'll See You Again" ("Whenever spring breaks through again") had people wiping tears away.

  It was old hat and corny, but it was done with such attention and energy that it was effective. It was the essence of the place itself: Scarborough was a success because it had stayed old-fashioned.

  No one swam at such places. "Let's look round the shops," people said. They milled around until four and then treated themselves to "a meat tea." Or they roamed the gardens at the Spa. They chased their children on the sand and encouraged each other to buy ice cream cones, which they called "cornets." They went to the matinées and saw in the flesh their favorite television stars—that fat comedian, that Cockney magician, that man who sang "There'll Always Be an England" so beautifully; the drag artist who did "Mother Goose."

  But mostly the seaside resort was tor sitting in the sunshine, reading something really lurid in the gutter press. Today it was the shooting of the Mad Killer. He had been tracked to Malton, only twenty miles away; he was found crouching in a shed near the tennis club; he was heading for the Malton police station—it was going to be part of what the papers called his "murder spree." He was asked to surrender, and when he refused, he was shot as he lay-in the shed.

  An elderly clay-pigeon champion had been watching the police close in. This was John Blades. "I just hoped he would go onto the tennis courts," Mr. Blades said. "I could have shot him between the eyes from two hundred yards, and that's just what I wanted to do." Chris Burr was putting milk bottles ou
t when he heard shots. He said, "It was just like the Alamo out there Really frightening. When it was all over, one policeman said to me, 'He had a ton of lead inside him.'"

  This I gathered from a Daily Mail handed to me by Phyllis Barmby, who shared a bench overlooking Clarence Gardens. She was glad the Mad Killer had been gunned down. If they had arrested him, he probably would have got a flipping suspended sentence. Ordinarily she didn't believe in capital punishment, but this lad was a nasty piece of work and deserved everything he got. She was not angry. You could tell she was pleased. The Mad Killer business, and its satisfying conclusion, was just the thing for a breezy day on the Front at Scarborough.

  Though Yorkshire was always associated, with factories and mines, four fifths of it was open country, and the whole of its coast was countrified. I walked to Osgodby and then to Filey. On the way I passed through some woods and saw a man shouting at a small owl. This was Edgar Overend, a local naturalist. He explained that it was an owlet. "A foolish woman gave it to me to feed. I've been going mad trying to catch mice for it. If she'd left it alone, its mother would have looked after it. But no, she had to meddle! Now the little chap doesn't want to fly away."

  The owlet sat on the ground, staring sadly at Edgar Overend.

  "Of! you go," Mr. Overend said.

  The owlet was uncomprehending. Then it twisted its head upward. A bird had just flown by.

  "That's it— you fly," Mr. Overend said. "Shoo!"

  The owlet didn't move.

  Mr. Overend clapped his hands sharply.

  The owlet jumped into the air and made for a treetop.

  "At last!" Mr. Overend said. "He'll be all right."

  At Filey I saw a holiday camp ahead and hurried to the road. I caught a bus and climbed to the top deck. It was like being in a boat riding the swells of a sea that was running high. I became seasick—nauseated, anyway—and descended to the lower deck. If there hadn't been a railway strike, I could have taken a train from Scarborough. At Bridlington, I took another bus to Flamborough Head, a headland and chalk stack so huge, I had seen it from twenty miles away as I had walked toward Scarborough. This, unfortunately, was one of the Yorkshire sights—a popular outing—so I did not stay, but instead took a bus south to Beverley, all the while cursing the buses.