To the Ends of the Earth (29 page)

It was a shire full of mountains, with spaces between—some valleys and some moors—and each mountain was separate. To describe the landscape it was necessary to describe
each mountain, because each one was unique. But the soil was not very good, the sheep were small, the grass thin, and I never walked very far without finding a corpse—loose wool blowing around bones, and the bared teeth of a skull.

“Look,” a shepherd named Stephen said to me on one of these hillsides.

A buzzard-sized bird was circling.

“It’s a hooded crow,” Stephen said. “They’re desperate creatures. In a place like this—no shelter, no one around for miles—they find a lamb and peck its eyes out. It’s lost, it can’t get to its mother, it gets weak. Then the hooded crows—so patient up there—dive low and peck it to pieces. They’re a terrible bird.”

He said that it was the predatory crows, not the weather, that killed the lambs. It was a cold place, but not excessively so. In winter there was little snow, though the winds were strong and the easterlies were usually freezing gales. There were always birds in the wind—crows and hawks and comic squawking oystercatchers with long orange bills and singing larks and long-necked shags and stuttering stonechats.

It could be an eerie landscape, especially on a wet day, with all the scattered bones gleaming against the dun-colored cliffs and the wind scraping against the heather. It surprised me that I was happy in a place where there were so few trees—there were none at all here. It was not picturesque and it was practically unphotographable. It was stunningly empty. It looked like a corner of another planet, and at times it seemed diabolical. But I liked it for all these reasons. And more important than these, my chief reason for being happy was that I felt safe here. The landscape was like a fierce-looking monster that offered me protection; being in Cape Wrath was like having a pet dragon.

I
TRIED TO HITCHHIKE IN ORDER TO GET TO
A
NSTRUTHER IN
time to see the Queen, but no one picked me up. I fell in with a farm laborer on the road. He was coming from St. Andrews. He had gone there for the Royal Visit.

“I saw the Queen,” he said, and he winced, remembering.

“How did she look?”

He winced again. His name was Dougie. He wore rubber boots. He said, “She were deep in thought.”

Dougie had seen something no one else had.

“She were preoccupied. Her face were gray. She weren’t happy.”

I said, “I thought she was happy about her new grandson.”

Dougie disagreed. “I think she were worried about something. They do worry, you know. Aye, it’s a terrible job.”

He began to walk slowly, as if in sympathy for the hard-pressed Queen.

I said, “Being Queen of England has its compensations.”

“Some compensations and some disadvantages,” Dougie said. “I say it’s half a dream world and half a nightmare. It’s a goldfish bowl. No privacy! She can’t pick her nose without someone seeing her.”

Dougie said this in an anguished way, and I thought it was curious, though I did not say so, that he was pained because the monarch could not pick her nose without being observed.

He then began to talk about television programs. He said his favorite program was “The Dukes of Hazzard,” which concerned high jinks in a town in the American South. This
Scottish farm laborer in Fifeshire said that he liked it because of the way the character Roscoe talked to his boss. That was very funny. American humor was hard to understand at times, he said, but every farm laborer in Scotland would find Roscoe funny for his attitude.

At last a bus came. I flagged it down. It was empty. I said I wanted to go to Anstruther to see the Queen.

“Aye. She’s having lunch there,” the driver said.

I wondered where.

The driver knew. “At the Craw’s Nest. It’s a small hotel on the Pittenweem Road.”

He dropped me farther along and I followed the bunting into Anstruther, sensing that same vibrant glow that I had felt at St. Andrews—the royal buzz. It was a holiday atmosphere. The schools were out. The shops were closed. The pubs were open. Some men were wearing kilts. People were talking in groups, seeming to remind one another of what had just happened—the Queen had already gone by, to the Craw’s Nest.

I cut across the harbor sands and went up the road to what seemed a very ordinary hotel—but freshly painted and draped in lines of plastic Union Jacks. There were more men in kilts here—they had such wonderfully upright posture, the men in kilts: they never slouched and hardly ever sat down.

“She’s just left,” one said. His name was Hector Hay McKaye.

But there was something of her still here, like perfume that is strongest when a woman leaves suddenly. In the Queen’s case it was like something overhead—still up there, an echo.

Mr. McKaye turned to his friends and said, “They had two detectives in the kitchen—”

It seemed to me that if the Queen and Prince Philip had eaten here, the food might be good. I seldom had a good meal in my traveling, not that it mattered much: food was one of the dullest subjects. I decided to stay the night at the Craw’s Nest. And this hotel, which had just received the blessing of a Royal Visit, was a great deal cheaper than any hotel in Aberdeen.

“She never had a starter,” the waitress Eira said. “She had the fish course, haddock Mornay. Then roast beef, broccoli, and carrots. And fresh strawberries and cream for dessert. Our own chef did it. It was a simple meal—it was good. The menu was printed and had bits of gold foil around it.”

Much was made of the good plain food. It was English food—a fish course, a roast, two boiled vegetables, and fruit for the dessert course. The middle-class families in Anstruther—and everywhere else—had that every Sunday for lunch.
She’s just like us
, people said of the Queen;
of course, she works a jolly sight harder!

What was difficult for an alien to see was that this was essentially a middle-class monarchy. Decent philistines, the royal couple liked animals and country-house sports and variety shows. They never mentioned books at all, but they were famous for preferring certain television programs. Newspapers had published photographs of the Royal Television Set: it had a big screen and a sort of shawl on the top, but it was just like one you could hire for two quid a week up the High Street. Over the years the Queen had become shrewder-seeming, an even-tempered mother-in-law and a kindly gran. Prince Philip was loved for being irascible. He was noted for his grouchy remarks. He used the word
bloody
in public, and after that it was hard for anyone to find fault with him. The Queen was his opposite, growing smaller and squashier as he seemed to lengthen and grow spiky—the illusion had sprung out of his having become vocal. The Queen and the Prince were well matched, but it was less the sovereign and her consort than the double act that all successful middle-class marriages are.

In the lobby they were selling souvenirs of the Royal Visit. How had they had time to prepare these paperweights and medallions and letter openers and postcards saying
CRAW’S NEST HOTEL—SOUVENIR OF THE ROYAL VISIT?

“We knew about it in January, but we had to keep it a secret until May,” Eira said. “We kept praying that nothing would go wrong. We thought the Falklands might finish it.”

So they had been putting the place in order and running
up souvenirs for almost seven months. The royal lunch had lasted an hour.

That night they held a celebration party in the hotel parking lot. It was a way of giving thanks. The hotel invited the whole town, or rather two—Easter Anstruther and Wester Anstruther. They had a rock band and eight pipers and some drummers. The racket was tremendous and continued until two o’clock in the morning, hundreds of people drinking and dancing. They sold sausages and fish and chips, and there were bales of hay for people to sit on. The band was bad, but no one seemed to mind. There were old people, families, drunks, and dogs. Small boys smoked cigarettes in a delighted way and sneaked beer from the hotel. Girls danced with each other, because the village boys, too embarrassed to be seen dancing, congregated in small groups and pretended to be tough. There was a good feeling in the air, hilarity and joy, something festive, but also grateful and exhausted. It wasn’t faked; it was like the atmosphere of an African village enjoying itself.

The cleaning ladies were buzzing early the next morning.

“I couldn’t believe it,” Mrs. Ross said. “It didn’t seem real. It was like a dream.”

I said, “What will Willie Hamilton think?”

Willie Hamilton was their Member of Parliament and noted for being in favor of abolishing the monarchy.

“Willie Hamilton can get stuffed.”

R
OSALIE AND
H
UGH
M
UTTON COLLECTED PRESERVED RAILWAYS
. They had been on the Romney, Hythe, and Dym-church; 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. This North Norfolk Railway 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. Because of the railway strike all these trippers had come by car.

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 groins, 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 “Dad’s 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 groin on the beach, reading a comic book about war in outer space.

S
EASIDE
S
PECIAL
’82
WAS PLAYING AT THE
P
AVILION
T
HEATRE
, 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,

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!”