The Kingdom by the Sea

by Paul Theroux

  At North Somercotes we passed Locksley Hall. I should have known it from the way it overlooked the sandy tracts and the long hollow ocean ridges.

  O the dreary, dreary moorland! O the barren shore!

  But was it really better, as the poem said, to have "fifty years of Europe than a cycle of Cathay"? It did not seem so in Mablethorpe, a flat, sad place modeled on a holiday camp and thronged with shivering vacationers. It was cold, but that was not the reason these people were scowling. This was the coast of last resorts. In other years these people had had their fish and chips in Spain, but there was less work now, and all their dole money got them this year was this place and Mumby and Hogsthorpe and Sutton-on-Sea. It was a dole holiday, a cheapie, and no more fun than a day out from the prison farm, some enforced fresh air, and then back to the classified ads and the Job Centre.

  The caravan sites with their acres of tin boxes—whole caravan towns, in fact, tucked behind the duney shore—rivaled those I had seen on the coast of Wales. This was also a sort of miners' Riviera, for as we neared Skegness we passed holiday camp hotels. They had the look of painted prisons: the Nottinghamshire Miners' Holiday Home and the Derbyshire Miners' Holiday Centre and the huge wind-whipped Eastgate Holiday Centre at Ingoldmells. Fourteen applicants had expressed an eagerness to enter Eastgate's Miss Topless Competition—a tit show for amateurs—but the odd thing was that there were not enough vacationers to watch it, so the date had been pushed ahead to late August.

  And then Skeggy itself—it deserved its ragged-sounding nickname. It was a low, loud, faded seaside resort. It was utterly joyless. Its vulgarity was uninteresting. It was painfully ugly. It made the English seem dangerous. And, at last, it made me want to leave—to take long strides down its broad sands and walk all the way to Friskney Flats. But there was no walking here—too muddy, too many of the canals and ditches they called "drains" here, and no path. There was no train, so I took a bus, or rather several of them, along the silty shore of the Wash, getting off at Butterwick and walking to Boston.

  Boston's church—the Stump, they called it—was so tall and the land around it so flat that I was able to see it for a whole afternoon as I rode and walked toward it. From a distance it looked like a water tower, and closer like a gray stone lantern, and in Boston itself it resembled a stone crown on a pillar. This corner of the Wash was all a landscape of ancient churches separated by flat fields. I could not see the shore until I was on top of it, and it was impossible to walk there without getting wet feet. It was like the Netherlands—that white Dutch daylight and hard-packed sand and measured fields and plain old houses set in Calvinist clumps, with miles of vegetables between. The landscape was austere, but the place names were fantastic: Fishtoft, Breast Sand, Whaplode, Pode Hole, and Quadring Eudike; and a very ordinary street would have a name like Belchmire Lane. But it was so flat, you could see a mature poplar tree ten miles away.

  ***

  After more than a week of the railway strike, the management of British Rail said that they were breaking it. They said the drivers were showing up. They said the railways were being manned in a modest way. They said that all over the country people were traveling to work on trains—10 percent of the trains were running.

  London news had always sounded a little strange when I heard it in places like Enniskillen, Mallaig, Porlock, or Grimsby. Now in King's Lynn it was perplexing to read of these running trains. There was none running in King's Lynn. The station was empty. It was another lie, like "Rail-stricken Britain rolls on." No one I saw was going anywhere.

  King's Lynn was dignified and dull, its stately center so finely preserved, it looked embalmed; and grafted to it was a shopping precinct. This rabbit warren was all discount stores and boutiques and hamburger joints; it would not have seemed out of place in Hyannis, Massachusetts, though it was a little too vulgar for Osterville. King's Lynn's Skinheads and motorcyclists were particularly boisterous—these gangs seemed to me as much a part of the fine old market towns in provincial England as the period houses and the graceful windows, and they seemed especially to enjoy roaring down quaint cobblestone streets on their Japanese motorbikes. They called the bikes "hogs" in their gentle rustic accents.

  But King's Lynn was a habitable place and patchily pretty, and it had hopes. The King's Lynn Festival would be starting soon. The brochures promised eight concerts, five orchestras, a jazz band, several plays, poetry readings, numerous movies, and puppet shows. And although it was some miles from the coast—if the Wash could be called the coast—it had the air of a seaport, and the same Dutchness I had sensed in Lincolnshire.

  Five railway lines had met at King's Lynn, where there was now one—and it was strike-bound. It was marshy along the shore to Hunstanton. So I took the bus to the top of the Norfolk coast, Wells-next-the-Sea. It was such a tame landscape of meadows and thin woods that it looked like Wimbledon Common for forty miles. Wells and its neighbor, Stiffkey, were famous for their cockles. I walked at the edge of the salt marsh and had some cockles for lunch. They were salty and had the texture of lumps of underdone pasta. Stiffkey had once had a rector at its church who had scandalized—"thrilled" was probably a more apt word—English society by trying to reform prostitutes. I stopped at a public house in Stiffkey to ask about this notorious clergyman, but before I could introduce the subject, the barman (Fred Watmough) began talking about trains. He said there was one at Weybourne that ran to Sheringham, and it was running.

  "What about the strike?"

  Mr. Watmough said, "This is a private line. They call it 'the Poppy Line.' Very pretty."

  I walked to Weybourne, almost ten miles. But Weybourne was no more than a hamlet—flinty cottages, a square-towered church, and a lovely windmill. A small sign said north Norfolk railway and pointed up a country lane. That was another mile, between pines and pastures, and then Weybourne Station.

  "The last train—the last proper train—left here in 1964, traveling from Melton Constable to Great Yarmouth," Mr. Winch said. Mr. Winch was a volunteer on the North Norfolk Railway. "And now Melton Constable is just a little village in the middle of nowhere."

  "And if you said you wanted to take the train to Great Yarmouth, people would probably laugh," I said.

  "In actual fact," Mr. Winch said, "you can't get there from here."

  We sat on the platform, watching the poppies tossing in the wind.

  Mr. Winch said, "All they'll have left in a few years will be the big intercity routes. King's Lynn won't be on the map. Neither will Cromer or Great Yarmouth or Lowestoft."

  "How will people get around?"

  He said, "By car. And if they don't drive, they'll live in cities."

  "Everyone can't live in the cities," I said.

  "Correct," he said. "How's that for a game of soldiers?"

  Then he stood up.

  "They'll be diddling. Fiddle-faddling," he said. "But they won't get anywhere."

  I said, "Buses aren't the answer."

  Mr. Winch was looking at the oncoming train. He said, "Buses aren't even a good question. You go to a bus station and ask how to get to Swaffam. And they say, 'Go to Fakenham. You'll probably get a connection there.' They don't even have timetables."

  I wanted to say Yes, it's like South America, but I decided not to. And yet Mr. Winch would probably have agreed with me. In a self-critical mood the English could be brutal.

  And so I boarded the train. The North Norfolk Railway was a preserved line. It went three miles, to Sheringham, at a donkey trot. People snapped pictures of the engine and smiled admiringly at it. It was the railway buffs who were helping to dismantle British Railways. Their nostalgia was dangerous, since they hankered for the past and were never happier than when they were able to turn an old train into a toy. The commuter who spent two hours a day on the suburban train going to and from his place of work was very seldom a railway buff.

  Rosalie and Hugh Mutton collected preserved railways. They had been on the Romney, Hythe, and Dymchurch; the Ravenglass;
all the Welsh lines; and more. They loved steam. They would drive hundreds of miles in their Ford Escort to take a steam train. They were members of a steam railway preservation society. They lived in Luton. This one reminded them of the line in Shepton Mallet.

  Then Mrs. Mutton said, "Where's your casual top?"

  "I don't have a casual top in brown, do I," Mr. Mutton said.

  "Why are you wearing brown?"

  Mr. Mutton said, "I can't wear blue all the time, can I."

  Rhoda Gauntlett was at the window. She said, "That sea looks so lovely. And that grass. It's a golf course."

  We looked at the golf course—Sheringham, so soon.

  "I'd get confused going round a golf course," Mrs. Mutton said. "You walk bloody miles. How do you know which way to go?"

  This was the only train in Britain today, the fifteen-minute ride from Weybourne. It was sunny in Sheringham—a thousand people on the sandy beach, but only two people in the water.

  There were three old ladies walking along the Promenade. They had strong country accents, probably Norfolk. I could never place these burrs and haws.

  "I should have worn my blooming hat."

  "The air's fresh, but it's making my eyes water."

  "We can look round Woolworth's after we've had our tea."

  It was a day at the seaside, and then back to their cottages in Great Snoring. They were not like the others, who had come to sit behind canvas windbreaks ("eighty pence per day or any portion thereof') and read FOUR KILLED BY RUNAWAY LORRY or WIFE KILLER GIVEN THREE YEARS (she had taunted him about money; he did not earn much; he bashed her brains out with a hammer; "You've: suffered enough," the judge said) or BLUNDESTON CHILD BATTERED (bruised tot with broken leg; "He fell off a chair," the mother said; one year, pending psychiatric report). They crouched on the groynes, smoking cigarettes. They lay in the bright sunshine wearing raincoats. They stood in their bathing suits. Their skin was the veiny white of raw sausage casings.

  The tide was out, so I walked to Cromer along the sand. The crumbly yellow-dirt cliffs were like the banks of a quarry, high and scooped out and raked vertically by erosion. Halfway between Sheringham and Cromer there were no people, because, characteristically, the English never strayed far from their cars, and even the most crowded parts of the English coast were empty between the parking lots. Only one man was here, Collie Wylie, a rock collector. He was hacking amber-colored tubes out of the chalk slabs on the shore. Belamites, he called them. "Take that one," he said. "Now that one is between five and eight million years old."

  I saw a pillbox down the beach. It had once been on top of the cliff, and inside it the men from "Dads' Army" had conned for Germans. "Jerry would love to catch us on the hop." But the soft cliffs were constantly falling, and the pillbox had slipped a hundred feet and was now sinking into the sand, a cute little artifact from the war, buried to its gunholes.

  I came to Cromer. An old man in a greasy coat sat on a wooden groyne on the beach, reading a comic book about war in outer space.

  ***

  Seaside Special '82 was playing at the Pavilion Theatre, at the end of the pier at Cromer. It was the summer show, July to September, every day except Sunday, and two matinées. I had not gone to any of these end-of-the-pier shows. I was nearing the end of my circular tour, so I decided to stay in Cromer and see the show. I found a hotel. Cromer was very empty. It had a sort of atrophied charm, a high round-shouldered Edwardian look, red brick terraces and red brick hotels and the loudest seagulls in Norfolk.

  There were not more than thirty people in the audience that night at the Pavilion Theatre, which was pathetic, because there were nine people in the show. But seeing the show was like observing England's secret life—its anxiety in the dismal jokes, its sadness in the old songs.

  "Hands up, all those who aren't working," one comedian said.

  A number of hands went up—eight or ten—but this was a terrible admission, and down they went before I could count them properly.

  The comedian was already laughing. "Have some Beecham Pills," he said. "They'll get you 'working' again!"

  There were more jokes, awful ones like this, and then a lady singer came out and in a sweet voice sang "The Russian Nightingale." She encouraged the audience to join in the chorus of the next one, and they offered timid voices, singing,

  "Let him go, let him tarry,

  Let him sink, or let him swim.

  He doesn't care for me

  And I don't care for him."

  The comedians returned. They had changed their costumes. They had worn floppy hats the first time; now they wore bowler hats and squirting flowers.

  "We used to put manure on our rhubarb."

  "We used to put custard on ours!"

  No one laughed.

  "Got any matches?"

  "Yes, and they're good British ones."

  "How do you know?"

  "Because they're all strikers!"

  A child in the first row began to cry.

  The dancers came on. They were pretty girls and they danced well. They were billed as "Our Disco Dollies" on the poster. More singers appeared and "A Tribute to Al Jolson" was announced: nine minstrel show numbers, done in blackface. Entertainers in the United States could be run out of town for this sort of thing; in Cromer the audience applauded. Al Jolson was a fond memory and his rendition of "Mammy" was a special favorite in musical revues. No one had ever tired of minstrel shows in England, and they persisted on British television well into the 1970s.

  It had been less than a month since the end of the Falklands War, but in the second half of Seaside Special there was a comedy routine in which an Argentine general appeared—goofy dago in ill-fitting khaki uniform—"How dare you insult me!"

  I could hear the surf sloshing against the iron struts of the pier.

  "And you come and pour yourself on me," a man was singing. It was a love song. The audience seemed embarrassed by it. They preferred "California Here I Come" and "When I Grow Too Old to Dream," sung by a man named Derick, from Johannesburg. The program said that he had "appeared in every top night spot in South Africa and Rhodesia." Say "top night spot in Zimbabwe" and it does not sound the same—it brings to mind drums and thick foliage.

  One of the comedians reappeared. I had come to dread this man. I had reason. Now he played "The Warsaw Concerto" and cracked jokes as he played. "It's going to be eighty tomorrow," he said. "Forty in the morning and forty in the afternoon!"

  His jokes were flat, but the music was pleasant and the singers had excellent voices. In fact, most of the performers were talented, and they pretended to be playing to a full house—not the thirty of us who sat so silently in the echoing theater. The show people conveyed the impression that they were enjoying themselves. But it can't have been much fun, looking at those empty seats. Cromer itself was very dull. And I imagined these performers were miserably paid. I wanted to know more about them. I played with the idea of sending a message backstage to one of the chorus girls. I'd get her name out of the program. Millie Plackett, the one whose thighs jiggled. "Millie, it's for you! Maybe it's your big break!" Meet me after the show at the Hotel de Paris ... That was actually the name of my hotel, an enjoyable pile of brick and plaster splendor. But I didn't look the part. In my scratched leather jacket and torn dungarees and oily hiking shoes, I thought Millie Plackett might misunderstand my intentions.

  I stayed until the end of the show, finally admitting that I was enjoying myself. One act was of a kind I found irresistible—the magician whose tricks go wrong, leaving him with broken eggs in his hat and the wrong deck of cards. There was always an elaborate buildup and then a sudden collapse. "Presto," he said as the trick failed. And then the last trick, the one that looked dangerous, worked like a charm and was completely baffling.

  They saved the saddest song for the end. It was a love song, but in the circumstances it sounded nationalistic. It was sentimental hope, Ivor Novello gush, at the end of the pier that was trembling on the tide. I h
ad heard it elsewhere on the coast. It was anything but new, but it was the most popular number on the seaside that year:

  We'll gather lilacs in the spring agine,

  And walk together down a shady line...

  25. Striking Southend

  ON MY LAST LONG TRUDGE, curving down the rump of England on the Norfolk coast and into Suffolk, I thought: Every British bulge is different and every mile has its own mood. I said Blackpool, and people said, "Naturally!" I said Worthing, and they said, "Of all places!" The character was fixed, and though few coastal places matched their reputation, each was unique. It made my circular tour a pleasure, because it was always worth setting off in the morning. It might be bad ahead, but at least it was different; and the dreariest and most defoliated harbor town might be five minutes from a green sweep of bay.

  This was the reason "typical" was regarded as such an unfair word in England. And yet there was such a thing as typical on the coast—but to an alien, something typical could seem just as fascinating as the mosques of the Golden Horn.

  There was always an Esplanade, and always a Bandstand on it; always a War Memorial and a Rose Garden and a bench bearing a small stained plaque that said, To the Memory of Arthur Wetherup. There was always a Lifeboat Station and a Lighthouse and a Pier; a Putting Green, a Bowling Green, a Cricket Pitch, a Boating Lake, and a church the guidebook said was Perpendicular. The news agent sold two Greetings From picture postcards, one with kittens and the other with two plump girls in surf, and he had a selection of cartoon postcards with mildly filthy captions; the souvenir stall sold rock candy; and the local real estate agent advertised a dismal cottage as "chalet-bungalow, bags of character, on bus route, superb sea views, suit retired couple." There was always a fun fair and it was never fun, and the video machines were always busier than the pinball machines or the one-armed bandits. There was always an Indian restaurant and it was always called the Taj Mahal and the owners were always from Bangladesh. Of the three fish-and-chip shops, two were owned by Greeks and the third was always closed. The Chinese restaurant, Hong Kong Gardens, was always empty; Food to Take A way, its sign said. There were four pubs, one was the Red Lion, and the largest one was owned by a bad-tempered Londoner—"He's a real Cockney," people said; he had been in the army.