The Kingdom by the Sea (47 page)

After his retirement he continued to travel. He had never married. He was always alone. But the snapshots he kept showed him to be a very stylish dresser—waistcoat, plus fours, cashmere overcoat, homburg, stickpin. A characteristic of natty dressers is that they wear too many clothes. Duffill's snapshots showed this; and he always wore a hat.

He wore a ruglike wig, I was told. "It stuck out in the back." He had had brain surgery. "He once played tennis in Cairo." He had gone on socialist holidays to eastern Europe. He hated Hitler. He was very "spiritual," one of his old friends said. He became interested in the philosophy of George Ivanovich Gurdjieff and was a close friend of the great Gurdjieff scholar John Godolphin Bennett. "And after a while Richard got frightfully steamed up about dervishes," Bennett's widow told me. That was why Duffill was on his way to Istanbul, she said—to renew his acquaintance with some whirling dervishes!

But what I wanted to know was what had happened to him after the Orient Express pulled out of Domodossola.

Mrs. Jack said, "He got out at a station. He didn't tell me where. He had left his luggage on the train. Then the train pulled out. He inquired when the next train was, and they told him the time—five o'clock. Only a few hours, he thought. But he had got mixed up. He thought they meant
P.M.
and they actually meant
A.M.
—five the next morning. He had a very bad night, and the next day he went to—where was it? Venice? Yes, he collected his luggage"—the paper bags I had left with the
controllore
—"and eventually got to Istanbul."

So he had made it!

I told Mrs. Jack who I was and how I had met Mr. Duffill.

She said, "Oh, yes, I read your book! My neighbor's son is an avid reader. He told us about it. He said, 'I think you should see this—I think this is our Mr. Duffill.' And then everyone in Barrow read it."

I was eager to know whether Mr. Duffill himself had read it.

"I wanted him to see it," Mrs. Jack said. "I put a copy aside. But when he came over, he wasn't too good. He didn't see it. The next time he came over I forgot about the book. That was the last time, really. He had his stroke and just deteriorated. And he died. So he never saw it—"

Thank God for that, I thought.

What an interesting man that stranger had been! He had seemed frail, elderly, a little crazy and suspicious on the Orient Express. Typical, I had thought. But now I knew how unusual he had been—brave, kind, secretive, resourceful, solitary, brilliant. He had slept and snored in the upper berth of my compartment. I had not known him at all, but the more I found out about him, the more I missed him. It would have been a privilege to know him personally, and yet even in friendship he would never have confirmed what I strongly suspected—that he had almost certainly been a spy.

A
T
G
RIMSBY
I bought a London paper with the headline
RAIL-STRICKEN BRITAIN ROLLS ON
! But nothing was rolling in Grimsby, not even a train for the three miles to Cleethorpes. Nothing had been rolling in Scarborough, where I had walked, or Hull, where I had wasted a day on a bus that had taken Mexican-style detours. (It was literally true that English country buses sometimes went backward.) Nothing was rolling at all: I never saw a train in motion during the long railway strike. The government kept claiming that a number of trains were operating and that the strike (the issue was drivers' work schedules) was halfhearted. London news always seemed shrill and untruthful upcountry, but this situation-normal news was a damned lie in Grimsby and a cruel joke in poor starved Cleethorpes.

On the bus to Cleethorpes, the man in the next seat, Jim Popplewell, explained that he was a carpet-layer. "But when times are bad, people stop buying carpets," he said. He was earning 50 percent less than he had two years ago.

"What do you think of the north?" he asked. He meant here.

"I don't think of this as the north," I said. After all, I had been to Cape Wrath, four hundred miles north of this.

"But this
is
the north," Mr. Popplewell said. "It's not half bad. Have a look at the Wolds."

"What exactly are the Wolds?"

"Woods," he said. "Some hills. You'll see them as you head towards Lincoln."

I said I would be sticking to the coast.

"Mablethorpe," he said. "Skeggy."

"That kind of thing," I said.

"I see. You just go from pillar to post."

He said it in a kindly way. I was sure he meant "from place to place." But his statement was nonetheless accurate.

Was Cleethorpes a pillar or a post? It looked a terrible place. I wanted to go away. But how? The only way I could have left was on foot, in the rain, sinking in the mud of the Humber Bank. So I stayed the night in Cleethorpes and watched filthy children playing Tiggy. It was a version of tag. Home was called the Hob. "If we tig the 'ob before 'e gets to the 'ob, we say 'on the 'ob.'" They were twelve-year-olds and a little wary of me. "It's okay," one called to the others, "'e's not a copper!" I must have seemed a little strange to them—all my questions. But I was lonely, I was killing time, I wanted to leave Cleethorpes—to go anywhere. I mentioned Mablethorpe. The salesmen in the hotel laughed at this. Mablethorpe was anywhere.

The salesmen were that dying breed of hustlers that I had first seen on the Kent coast at Littlestone-on-Sea. They talked about places being "shocking." They talked about their territory, calling it "my parish." These gents stopping the night at the Dolphin in Cleethorpes sold everything—brushes, plastic basins, outsized garments, double-glazing. One man told me he went a thousand miles a week in his car and made a hundred and eighty calls. He drove all over Lincolnshire and Yorkshire—automobile spares. A camera salesman told me that the profit on a hundred-quid camera was a fiver for a retailer—hardly worth the effort, since he could make the same profit selling four rolls of film. This man, Jessel by name, said, "We'll all be out of a job in a year or two. My job could be done by a computer. It wouldn't be the same—no human element, see—but it would be cheaper for my company."

The next day I walked back to Grimsby. I asked the way and a lady said, "You must be going to the docks."

Did I look like an able seaman? My coastal traveling had obviously taken its toll on my appearance. I was both flattered and appalled. Here I was, months after leaving Margate, still wearing my leather jacket and my oily shoes and my knapsack, and I suppose I was a little pigeon-toed from walking in a clockwise direction.

There had been stock-car racing and wrestling and bingo at Cleethorpes, but just next door in Grimsby there was the Caxton Theatre and the fish docks and a. sense that this had once been a bustling place and had only recently collapsed. The buildings and high-rise parking lots still stood, but they were empty. A sign at a Grimsby shop selling leathers and furs said,
Coneys.
I had never seen this old word for rabbit in an advertisement before—and it was also a famous word for "suckers."

The railway station was still shut. Only one bus today was going down the coast—the Ron Appleby coach to Mablethorpe. Well, that was my general direction. There were only five of us on board. I sat down and read the London papers again—more gloating, and what had already begun to be called "the Falklands' spirit." Had these past months produced a national shift of mood? "The travelling public are coping magnificently with the strike ... Many people have found they can do quite well without British Rail," the Tory papers said. More lies. But the truth was pitiable: five dinks bumping down to Mablethorpe. My guess was that most people were coping with the strike by not traveling at all. That was the British way: inaction was a form of coping.

"Not a bad place is Grimsby," an old man in the bus said to me. His name was Sam Dunball and he had worked at the fish docks. He was retired now, and a good thing, too, he said. "The fish is gone and the docks is half-empty. Tt was the Cod War that finished Grimsby. We haven't been the same since. No, there's no fishing industry here anymore."

The so-called Cod War had been a legal dispute over Britain's traditional fishing grounds off the coast of Iceland. A two-hundred-mile fishing limit was declared by Iceland. There was a wrangle, which Britain lost. And the fishing industry in Britain was broken.

Mr. Dunball wanted to know what I thought of London.

I told him that I thought London was more like a country than a city. It was a sort of independent republic.

"I was in London once!" Mr. Dunball said. "It was before the war. Simpson's Hotel in the Caledonian Road, four-and-sixpence bed and breakfast. The doorknob, see, was in the middle of the door, and you pushed it and walked downstairs to the parlor. I was down there attending a course at Houndsditch Technical College. But it didn't do me a bit of good. I always wanted to go down for a Cup Final, but I never did. I just went that one time. I'll never forget it."

We skirted the Wolds—they looked like low rolls of fog in the distance—and then we traveled through the spinach fields of Lincolnshire. It was an area of great flatness, land like sea, and a wide sky of white vacant light. There was something about this even landscape and the four-square farmhouses and the geometry of the fields that hinted at moral probity and Bible-reading and rectitude. It was clear in the angles of the hedges and all the way to the straight, ruled horizon. The highest object in the landscape was the church spire, and this solitary pencil point was a kind of sanctifying emphasis that could be seen ten miles away. But it was all illusion, like the apparent disorder that made jungles seem savage to missionaries. And yet it was true that people who lived in sight of a flat horizon tended to build square houses.

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.