To the Ends of the Earth (22 page)

She did not look at me. She drew level and didn’t notice me. There was no other human being in sight on the coast, only a fishing boat out there like a black flatiron. Hetta Poumphrey—I imagined that was the woman’s name—was striding, lifting the hem of her coat with her knees. Now she was a fraction past me, and still stony-faced.

“Morning!” I said.

“Oh.” She twisted her head at me. “Good morning!”

She gave me a good smile, because I had spoken first. But if I hadn’t, we would have passed each other, Hetta and I, in that clifftop meadow—not another soul around—five feet apart, in the vibrant silence that was taken for safety here without a word.

T
HE HOTEL WAS NOT FULL—A DOZEN MEN, ALL OF THEM
middle-aged and hearty and full of chat, making a remark
and then laughing at it too loudly. They had been beating up and down the coast with cases of samples, and business was terrible. You mentioned a town, any town—Dover—and they always said, “Dover’s shocking.” They had the harsh, kidding manner of traveling salesmen, a clumsy carelessness with the waitresses, a way of making the poor girls nervous, bullying them because they had had no luck with their own wives and daughters.

Mr. Figham, motor spares and car accessories, down from Maidstone, said the whole of Kent was his “parish”—his territory, shocking place. He was balding and a little boastful and salesman-skittish; he asked for the sweets trolley, and as the pretty waitress stopped, he looked at the way her uniform tightened against her thigh and said, “That chocolate cake tickles my fancy—”

The waitress removed the cake dish.

“—and it’s about the only thing that does, at my age.”

Mr. Figham was not much more than fifty, and the three other men at his table, about the same age, laughed in a sad agreeing way, acknowledging that they were impotent and being a little wry about their sorry cocks not working properly. To eavesdrop on middle-aged Englishmen was often to hear them commenting on their lack of sexual drive.

I sat with all the salesmen later that night watching the hotel’s television, the Falklands news. There was some anticipation. “I was listening to my car radio as I came down the M-Twenty.… One of my people said … A chap’s supply in Ashford had heard …” But no one was definite—no one dared. “… something about British casualties …”

It was the sinking of the
Sheffield
. The news was announced on television. It silenced the room: the first British casualties, a brand-new ship. Many men were dead and the ship was still burning.

As long as the Falklands War had been without British deaths, it was an ingenious campaign, clever footwork, an adventure. That was admired here: a nimble reply, no blood, no deaths. But this was dreadful and incriminating, and it had to be answered. It committed Britain to a struggle that no one really seemed to want.

One of the salesmen said, “That’ll take the wind out of our sails.”

There was a Chinese man in the room. He began to speak—the others had been watching him, and when he spoke they looked sharply at him, as if expecting him to say something in Chinese. But he spoke in English.

He said, “That’s a serious blow for us.”

Everyone murmured,
Yes, that was a serious blow for us
, and
What next?
But I didn’t open my mouth, because already I felt like an enemy agent. I agreed with what the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges had said about this Falklands War: “It is like two bald men fighting over a comb.”

A
MAN IN
H
ASTINGS SAID TO ME
, “W
HY DID
I
COME HERE
to live? That’s easy. Because it is one of the three cheapest places in England.” He told me the other two, but in my enthusiasm to know more about Hastings I forgot to write the others down. This man was the painter John Bratby. He did the paintings for the movie
The Horse’s Mouth
, and his own life somewhat resembled that of Gulley Jimson, the painter hero of the Joyce Cary novel on which the movie was based.

Mr. Bratby was speaking in a room full of paintings, some of them still wet. He said, “I could never buy a house this large in London or anywhere else. I’d have a poky flat if I didn’t live in Hastings.”

His house was called the Cupola and Tower of the Winds and it matched its name. It was tall and crumbling, and it creaked when the wind blew, and there were stacks of paintings leaning against every wall. Mr. Bratby was thickset
and had the listening expression of a forgetful man. He said he painted quickly. He sometimes referred to his famous riotous past—so riotous, it had nearly killed him. He had been a so-called kitchen sink painter with a taste for drawing rooms. Now he lived in a quiet way. He said he believed that Western society was doomed, but he said this as he looked out of his Cupola window at the rooftops and the sea of Hastings, a pleasant view.

“Our society is changing from one based on the concept of the individual and freedom,” Mr. Bratby said, “to one where the individual is nonexistent—lost in a collectivist state.”

I said I didn’t think it would be a collectivist state so much as a wilderness in which most people lived hand to mouth, and the rich would live like princes—better than the rich had ever lived, except that their lives would constantly be in danger from the hungry, predatory poor. All the technology would serve the rich, but they would need it for their own protection and to ensure their continued prosperity. The poor would live like dogs. They would be dangerous and pitiful, and the rich would probably hunt them for sport.

This vision of mine did not rouse Mr. Bratby, who was at that moment painting my portrait—“There is no commercial consideration to this at all.” He had said of my painting, “This is for posterity to see, when our society has completely changed.” He did not reject my description of the future. He scratched his head and went on dreading a police state where everyone wore baggy blue suits and called each other “Comrade”—the Orwell nightmare, which was a warning rather than a reasonable prediction. Anyway, it was almost 1984, and here was J. Bratby in a delightful wreck of a house, painting his heart out in Hastings, the bargain paradise of the south coast!

It seemed to me that his fear of the future was actually a hatred of the present, and yet he was an otherwise cheery soul and full of projects (“Guess what it is—the long one. It’s all the Canterbury pilgrims. Chaucer, you see.”). He said he never traveled but that his wife was very keen on it—had always wanted to go to New Orleans, for some reason.
Now, his wife, Pam, was very attentive. She wore red leather trousers and made me a bacon sandwich. Bratby said that he had met her through a lonely hearts column, one of those classified ads that say
LONELY GENT
, 54,
STOUT BUT NOT FAT, A PAINTER BY PROFESSION, SOUTH COAST, WISHES TO MEET …
In this way they had met and had hit it off and got married.

H
OVE, LIKE MANY OTHER PLACES ON THE
E
NGLISH COAST
, had chalets. The name was misleading. They were huts, and
chalet
was mispronounced to suit them: “shally,” the English said, an appropriate word made out of shanty and alley. There were hundreds of them shoulder to shoulder along the Front. They had evolved from bathing machines, I guessed. The English were prudish about nakedness (and swimming for the Victorians had been regarded as the opposite of a sport—it was a sort of immersion cure, a cross between colonic irrigation and baptism). The bathing machine—a shed on a pair of wheels—had been turned into a stationary changing room, and then arranged in rows on the beachfront, and at last had become a miniature house—a shally.

Hove’s shallys were the size of English garden sheds. I looked into them, fully expecting to see rusty lawnmowers and rakes and watering cans. Sometimes they held bicycles, but more often these one-room shallys were furnished like dollhouses or toy bungalows. You could see what the English considered essential to their comfort for a day at the beach. They were painted, they had framed prints (cats, horses, sailboats) on the wall and plastic roses in jam-jar vases. All had folding deck chairs inside and a shelf at the
rear on which there was a hotplate and a dented kettle and some china cups. They were fitted out for tea and naps—many had camp cots, plastic cushions, and blankets; some had fishing tackle; a few held toys. It was not unusual to see half a fruitcake, an umbrella, and an Agatha Christie inside; and most held an old person, looking flustered.

All the shallys had numbers, some very high numbers, testifying to their multitude. But the numbers did not distinguish them, for they all had names: Seaview, the Waves, Sunny Hours, Bide-a-Wee, picked out on their doors or else lettered on plaques. They had double doors; some looked more like horse boxes than cottages. They had curtains. They had folding panels to keep out the wind. Many had a transistor radio buzzing, but the shally people were old-fashioned—they actually were the inheritors of the bathing-machine mentality—and they called their radios “the wireless” or even “my steam radio.”

They were rented by the year, or leased for several years, or owned outright—again, like bathing machines. But they were thoroughly colonized. They had small framed photographs of children and grandchildren. When it rained, their occupiers sat inside with their knees together, one person reading, the other knitting or snoozing, always bumping elbows. In better weather they did these things just outside, a foot or so from the front door. I never saw a can of beer or a bottle of whisky in a shally. The shally people had lived through the war. They had no money but plenty of time. They read newspapers, and that day everyone looked as if he were boning up for an exam on the Falklands campaign. It was becoming a very popular war.

The shallys were very close together, but paradoxically they were very private. In England, proximity creates invisible barriers. Each shally seemed to stand alone, no one taking any notice of the activity next door. Seaview was having tea while the Waves pondered the
Daily Express;
Sunny Hours was taking a siesta, and the pair at Bide-a-Wee were brooding over their mail. All conversation was in whispers. The shallys were not a community. Each shally was separate and isolated, nothing neighborly about it. Each had its own English atmosphere of hectic calm. A bylaw
stipulated that no one was allowed to spend a night in a shally, so the shally was a daylight refuge, and it was used with the intense preoccupation and the sort of all-excluding privacy that the English bring to anything they own—not creating any disturbance or encroaching on anyone else’s shally, and not sharing. Anyone who wished to know how the English lived would get a good idea by walking past the miles of these shallys, for while the average English home was closed to strangers—and was closed to friends, too: nothing personal, it just isn’t done—the shally was completely open to the stranger’s gaze, like the dollhouses they somewhat resembled that had one wall missing. It was easy to look inside. That’s why no one ever did.

I
STAYED IN
B
OGNOR LONGER THAN
I
HAD PLANNED
. I
GREW
to like Miss Pottage at Camelot. The beach was fine in the sunshine, and there was always an old man selling huge, horrible whelks out of a wooden box on the Front. He said he caught them himself. It was sunny, but the shops were closed and the Front was deserted. The season hadn’t started, people said.

I began to think that Bognor had been misrepresented. The oral tradition of travel in Britain was a shared experience of received opinion. Britain seemed small enough and discussed enough to be known at second hand. Dickens was known that way: it was an English trait to know about Dickens and Dickens’s characters without ever having read him. Places were known in this same way. That was why Brighton had a great reputation and why Margate was avoided. Dover, people said, the white cliffs of Dover. And Eastbourne’s lovely. And the Sink Ports, they’re lovely, too.
It was Dickens all over again, and with the same sort of distortions, the same prejudices, and some places they had all wrong.

“I don’t know as much as I should about Dungeness,” a man said to me, who didn’t know anything about it at all. I went away laughing.

Broadstairs was serious, but Bognor was a joke. I was told, “It’s like Edward the Seventh said”—it was George the Fifth—“his last words before he died. ‘Bugger Bognor!’ That’s what I say.” Bognor had an unfortunate name. Any English place name with
bog
or
bottom
in it was doomed. (“The bowdlerization of English place names has been a steady development since the late eighteenth century. In Northamptonshire alone, Buttocks Booth became Boothville, Pisford became Pitsford, and Shitlanger was turned into Shutlanger.”) Camber Sands had a nice rhythmical lilt and was seen as idyllic—but it wasn’t; Bognor contained a lavatorial echo, so it was seen as scruffy—but it wasn’t. All English people had opinions on which seaside places in England were pleasant and which were a waste of time. This was in the oral tradition. The English seldom traveled at random. They took well-organized vacations and held very strong views on places to which they had never been.

I
WALKED ALONG
W
EST
C
LIFF AND DOWN A ZIGZAG PATH TO
the promenade. I was not quite sure where I was headed, but this was the right direction—west; I had been going west for weeks. I walked past Alum Chine, where Stevenson wrote “Dr. Jekyll” (Bournemouth was the most literary place, with the ghosts of Henry James, Paul Verlaine, Tess Durbeyfield, Mary Shelley, and a half a dozen others haunting
its chines) and then, looking west, and seeing the two standing rocks on the headland across the bay, called Old Harry and Old Harry’s Wife, I decided to walk to Swanage, about fourteen miles along the coast.

My map showed a ferry at a place called Sandbanks, the entrance to Poole Harbour. I wondered whether it was running—the season had not started—so, not wishing to waste my time, I asked a man on the Promenade.