The Road to Little Dribbling (3 page)

“Then go to different places,” Larry agreed. “Go to”—he searched for a name to nominate, somewhere no one’s ever been—“Bognor Regis.”

I looked at him with interest. “That’s the second reference I have heard to Bognor Regis this week,” I said.

“Think of it as a sign,” Larry said.

—

Later that afternoon, at home, I pulled out my ancient and falling-apart
AA Complete Atlas of Britain
just to have a look. Apart from anything else I was curious to see what is the longest distance you can travel in Britain in a straight line. It is most assuredly not from Land’s End to John o’Groats, despite what my official study guide had said. (What it said, for the record, is: “The longest distance on the mainland is from John o’Groats on the north coast of Scotland to Land’s End in the southwest corner of England. It is about 870 miles.”) For one thing, the northernmost outcrop of mainland is not John o’Groats but Dunnet Head, eight miles to the west, and at least six other nubbins of land along that same stretch of coastline are more northerly than John o’Groats. But the real issue is that a journey from Land’s End to John o’Groats would require a series of zigzags to overcome Britain’s irregular shape. If you allow zigzags, then you could carom about the country in any pattern you wished and thus make the distance effectively infinite. I wanted to know what was the farthest you could travel in a straight line without crossing salt water. Laying a ruler across the page, I discovered to my surprise that the ruler tilted away from Land’s End and John o’Groats, like a deflected compass needle. The longest straight line actually started at the top left-hand side of the map at a lonely Scottish promontory called Cape Wrath. The bottom, even more interestingly, went straight through Bognor Regis.

Larry was right. It was a sign.

For the briefest of periods, I considered the possibility of traveling through Britain along my newly discovered line (the Bryson Line, as I would like it now to become generally known, since I was the one who discovered it), but I could see almost at once that that wouldn’t be practical or even desirable. It would mean, if I took it literally, going through people’s houses and yards, tramping across trackless fields, and fording rivers, which was clearly crazy; and if I just tried to stay close to it, it would mean endlessly picking my way through suburban streets in places like Macclesfield and Wolverhampton, which didn’t sound terribly rewarding either. But I could certainly use the Bryson Line as a kind of beacon, to guide my way. I determined that I would begin and end at its terminal points, and visit it from time to time en route when I conveniently could and when I remembered to do so, but I wouldn’t force myself to follow it religiously. It would be, rather, my
terminus ad quem,
whatever exactly that means. Along the way, I would, as far as possible, avoid the places I went on the first trip (too much danger of standing on a corner and harrumphing at how things had deteriorated since I was last there) and instead focus on places I had never been, in the hope I could see them with fresh, unbiased eyes.

I particularly liked the idea of Cape Wrath. I know nothing about it—it could be a caravan park, for all I know—but it sounded rugged and wave-battered and difficult to get to, a destination for a serious traveler. When people asked me where I was bound, I could gaze toward the northern horizon with a set expression and say: “Cape Wrath, God willing.” I imagined my listeners giving a low whistle of admiration and replying, “Gosh, that’s a long way.” I would nod in grim acknowledgment. “Not even sure if there’s a tearoom,” I would add.

But before that distant adventure, I had hundreds of miles of historic towns and lovely countryside to get through, and a visit to the celebrated English seaside at Bognor.

Chapter 1

Bugger Bognor!

B
EFORE
I
WENT THERE
for the first time, about all I knew about Bognor Regis, beyond how to spell it, was that some British monarch, at some uncertain point in the past, in a moment of deathbed acerbity, called out the words “Bugger Bognor” just before expiring, though which monarch it was and why his parting wish on earth was to see a medium-sized English coastal resort sodomized are questions I could not answer.

The monarch, I have since learned, was King George V, and the story is that in 1929 he traveled to Bognor on the advice of his physician, Lord Dawson of Penn, who proposed that a spell of fresh sea air might help him recover from a serious lung complaint. That Dawson could think of no better treatment than a change of scene is perhaps a reflection of his most outstanding characteristic as a doctor: incompetence. Dawson was in fact so celebrated for medical ineptitude that a ditty was composed in his honor. It went:

Lord Dawson of Penn

Has killed lots of men.

So that’s why we sing

God save the King.

The king chose Bognor not because he held any special affection for it, but because a rich chum of his named Sir Arthur du Cros had a mansion there called Craigweil House, which he offered to the king for his private use. Craigweil was by all accounts an ugly and uncomfortable retreat, and the king liked nothing about it, but the sea air did do him good and after a few months he was well enough to return to London. If he left with any fond memories of Bognor, he didn’t relate them.

Six years later, when the king relapsed and now lay dying, Dawson blandly assured him that soon he would be well enough to return to Bognor for another holiday. “Bugger Bognor,” the king reportedly said and thereupon died. The story is nearly always dismissed as fiction, but one of George V’s biographers, Kenneth Rose, maintains that it could be true and that it certainly would not have been out of character.

Because of the king’s short residency, Bognor petitioned to have the word “Regis” added to its title, and in 1929 this was granted, so that interestingly its supreme elevation and onset of terminal decline date from almost precisely the same moment.

—

Like so much of coastal Britain, Bognor has seen better days. Once everyone went to the seaside for holidays in Britain, but now hardly anyone does. It is cheaper to have a package holiday on the Mediterranean, where the weather is more reliably balmy, so many of the old resort towns wear a forlorn air. Bognor remained popular through the 1960s, but its real heyday was the twenties and thirties. It had a Theatre Royal, a grand Pavilion with what was said to be the finest dance floor in the south of England, and a much esteemed if not very accurately named Kursaal, where no one was cured of anything but patrons could roller skate to the music of a resident orchestra and afterward dine beneath giant palms. All that is distant history now.

The pier at Bognor survives, but barely. Seaside piers are a curious British phenomenon that I still don’t entirely understand. Years ago, when I was still quite new to Britain, I went with my future wife to Brighton for the day and there I saw my first pier, jutting out into the sea like a runway to nowhere. I’m from Iowa. We don’t have a lot of coastal infrastructure. I asked her what piers were for.

“Well, they let you walk out and see the sea,” she explained as if I were a little simple.

“But we can see the sea from here,” I pointed out.

“Yes, but you can see it better from a pier because it is
over
the sea.”

“Can you see coral reefs and shipwrecks and things?” I asked hopefully.

“No, it’s just murky water.”

“Can you see France?”

“Of course not. You just see the sea.” Her tone betrayed just a hint of exasperation. “You take the air. It’s very bracing.”

“And then what?”

“Then you go back to the promenade and stroll about and have some cockles or whelks and perhaps an ice cream, and then you get on a train and go home. It’s lovely, especially if it doesn’t rain.”

“I see,” I said, but really I was just being polite.

This introduction to the British seaside coincided almost exactly with the beginning of its long decline. The 1970s saw the rise of package holidays to the Mediterranean, which were cheaper than British holidays, even with air fares factored in, and allowed the British to experience a phenomenon they couldn’t get at home: sunburn. So resorts like Bognor began to fade away.

The pier at Bognor perfectly encapsulates its decline. Once it was a thousand feet long, but various owners took to lopping lengths off it following fires or storm damage so that today it is just a stub three hundred feet long that doesn’t quite reach the sea. For years Bognor had an annual birdman competition, in which competitors tried to get airborne from the pier end using various homemade contraptions—bicycles with rockets strapped to the sides and that sort of thing. Invariably the competitors would travel an amusingly short distance and splash into the water, to the delight of the watching crowds, but eventually the shortened pier meant that they were crash-landing on sand and gravel in a way that was more alarming than amusing. The competition was canceled in 2014 and appears now to have moved permanently a few miles down the coast to Worthing, where the prizes are bigger and the pier actually stands over water.

In an effort to reverse Bognor’s long decline, in 2005 Arun District Council formed the Bognor Regis Regeneration Task Force with the goal of bringing £500 million of investment to the town. As it became clear that nothing on that scale would ever be forthcoming, the target was quietly reduced first to £100 million and then to £25 million. These also proved too ambitious. Eventually it was decided that a more realistic target was a sum of about zero. When it was realized that that goal had already been reached, the task force was wound up, its work completed. Now, as far as I could tell, all the authorities are doing for Bognor is just keeping it ticking over, like a patient on life support.

But for all that Bognor isn’t such a bad place. It has a long beach with a curving concrete promenade, and a town center that is compact and tidy, if not actively thriving. Just inland from the sea is a sylvan retreat called Hotham Park, with winding paths, a boating pond, and a toy railway. But that, it must be said, is about it. If you do a web search for things to do in Bognor, Hotham Park is the first thing that comes up. The second suggested attraction is a shop selling mobility scooters.

I walked down to the seafront. A good number of people were ambling along, enjoying the sunshine. We were about to have a lovely summer and even now at ten thirty in the morning you could see that this day was going to be, by English standards, a scorcher. My original plan was to stroll west along the front to Craigweil, to see where the king had stayed, but that hope was dashed when I learned that Craigweil was torn down in 1939 and that today the site is lost somewhere beneath a housing estate. So instead I walked east along the promenade toward Felpham because that was the direction that nearly all the other strollers were going and I assumed they knew what they were doing.

On one side stood the beach and a bright, glittering sea, and on the other was a line of smart modern homes, all with high walls to preserve their privacy from us on the promenade. The owners, however, had not solved the obvious problem that a wall designed to keep passersby from peering in also keeps those on the inside from seeing out. If the occupants of these smart houses wanted to look at the sea, they had to go upstairs and sit on a balcony, but that meant exposing themselves to our gaze, and nothing makes a Briton more miserable than sacrificing his privacy. We could see everything about them—whether they were tanned or pale, having a cold drink or a hot one, were tabloid readers or broadsheet readers. The people on the balconies pretended not to be bothered about this, but you could tell they were. It was a lot to ask after all. They had to pretend first of all that their balconies somehow made them invisible to us, and then additionally they had to pretend that we were in any case such an incidental part of the panorama that they had never actually noticed us down there looking up at them. That was a lot of pretending to have to do.

As a test, I tried to make eye contact with the people on the balconies. I smiled as if to say, “Hello there, I see you!” but they always looked quickly away or affected not to see me at all, but rather were absorbed by something far off on the horizon, in the general vicinity of Dieppe or possibly Deauville. Sometimes I think it must be a little exhausting to be English. At all events, it seemed obvious to me that we on the promenade had much the better deal since we could see the sea at all times without having to go to a higher elevation and we never had to pretend that no one could see us. Best of all, at the end of the day we could get in our cars and drive home to somewhere that wasn’t Bognor Regis.

—

My plan, after Bognor, was to take a bus along the coast to Brighton, and I was quietly excited about this. I had never experienced this stretch of coastline and had great hopes for it. I had printed out a timetable and carefully selected the 12:19 as the best bus for my purposes, but as I ambled to the bus stop now, thinking I had minutes to spare, I watched in mild dismay as my bus departed just ahead of a cloud of black smoke. It took me a minute to work out that my watch was not right, that the battery was evidently dying. With a half hour to kill till the next bus, I went into a jeweler’s shop, where a cheerless man looked at the watch and told me that a replacement battery would be £30.