The Kingdom by the Sea (13 page)

"I like it straight," I said.

This delighted Lester Pride.

"The path," I said.

"Listen to him!" Lester Pride said, and ordered me a drink.

He was wearing a sweatshirt that said
LIFEGUARD
in large letters and, under it,
Beach Boys Club.

"It's the biggest faggots' club in California," he explained. He took a little bow. "You like it?"

I said it was very nice. An English person would wear a sweatshirt saying
Penn State
and regard it as the height of fashion that year. English style was full of backhanded compliments.

Lester Pride went to the window.

"There's a policeman outside. He's going to come in and arrest you for being drunk in charge of your leather jacket."

I was wearing my all-purpose leather jacket and my oily hiker's shoes.

"Where did you get that jacket! I hate it! My wife used to wear leather things all the time. I couldn't stand it! Which reminds me"—and now he addressed everyone at the bar—"celebration tomorrow, my
decree nisi.
Champagne for everyone!"

This was greeted with general approval, but Lester Pride just shrugged and stepped closer to me and said in a kind of mock-confidential way, "I run a pub not far from here, right? Listen, no one in two hundred years has ever lost money running it—except me! I'm going broke—I hate it. Why not come over and have a drink right—oh, God"—

I had downed my drink and was preparing to go back to my hotel.

"—you're going to walk to bloody Weymouth. You're just about to say you've got to get to bed early so you can bore everyone stiff with talk about rocks and interesting rock formations! Oh, Jesus, please forget it. Your leather jacket will get up and start without you—or those shoes, look at them, aren't they adorable—and you can catch up with them as they go hopping along the path. You Yanks are such—"

I left Swanage at nine the next morning, a lovely sunny day, and walked to Durlston Head. Below were the Tilly Whim Caves—more smuggler stories. I walked on, a little inland, so that I would not have to go up and down the bluffs. The gorse bushes had bright yellow flowers and the land was open—it was like traipsing around the edge of a great country, on top of its sliced-off side. I went across Dancing Ledge, and through Seacombe, and up Winspit, and various notches in the coast with steep terraces, and valleys of sheep browsing under ivy-strangled hawthorns. These terraces, the ridges of the edge of the valley, were caused by plowing six hundred years ago. At the village of Worth Matravers, I read that these furrows were called "strip lychetts," and the tourist sign said, "The need to plough such steep terraces was probably lessened after the dramatic population decline caused by the Black Death of 1348–9." Most of these Dorset villages were a great deal smaller than they had once been, and they had never recovered from the plague of the fourteenth century—nor had they forgotten it. The plague burying grounds were still clearly marked.

After lunch at the Square and Compass—the inn sign had something to do with the quarrying of local stone, a type of shelly limestone called Purbeck marble—I walked across a large headland called St. Alban's Head and hiked to a pretty bay, Chapman's Pool. On my way there I met Joan and Reg Flanchford. They were crossing a pasture.

"She's got a plastic hip," Reg Flanchford said.

They hurried behind me to the stile. I stepped aside and let the woman climb it.

"That's a plastic hip," Reg said.

Joan Flanchford tried to look dauntless.

"Put your best foot forward," Reg said.

Then Joan was on the other side, and I was making tracks for Houns-tout Cliff, which was almost vertical for a hundred and seventy-five feet, but full of birds. The coast cut in and led me up and down and took me past a waterfall splashing into the sea and it foamed on the gray shale foreshore that was scored in straight squares, like great flat paving stones.

The sun and wind made the long grass flicker like fire on the Kimmeridge Ledges. I walked these cliffs through the hot afternoon and did not meet another soul. There were pastures on the cliffs, and just to the left of the overgrown path two hundred vertical feet of gull-clawed air to the sliding surf, and the whole ocean beyond. This was the most beautiful stretch of coast I had seen so far, and I was alone on it. My happiness was greatly increased by the thought that I did not have the slightest idea where I was going. I always felt I was safe—everything would be fine—if I stayed on the coast.

There was a tower at the edge of the cliff ahead. It stood on its own; it was attached to nothing; it looked like a ruined lighthouse. This was at Kimmeridge Bay. A man with a pamphlet, named Ever-creech, told me that it was called the Clavel Tower and that it was almost two hundred years old. Clavel was a clergyman and also a star-gazer. He had used the tower for his astronomy. It was a delicate structure, and the steeps and headlands of this coast made it seem more delicate, because there was no other building near it.

Just inland there was a parking lot. Most of the people were in their cars, staring out to sea, but some others were tramping around and smiling and looking winded.

I sat down on the grass below the tower. That noise was not the sea—it was the booming of big guns. Just west of the bay my map labeled the next six miles
Danger Area.
It was another army firing range, and they were at it today—presumably practicing for the Falklands. I walked into Gaulter Gap and saw that red flags were flying at the onward path: no entry.

My detour took me inland, via Corfe Castle and Wareham and some tiny Dorset villages. I found some friends. I ate spaghetti. I drank scrumpy. I listened to the Stranglers—their current hit was about the pleasures of heroin. I made my way back to the coast, stepping onto it again at Lulworth Cover, on the other side of the firing range.

Then it was so steep and tedious that I could not enjoy the odd landscape features—the circularity of the cove, the comic look of Durdle Door, the precipice at Bat's Head. I hurried on the path toward Weymouth, where I wanted to spend the night. But it was a long hike. I headed for the cliffs at White Nothe—flesh-pale, corpselike stone—and then above Ringstead Bay to Burning Cliff, a ledge of combustible shale. John Miles, from the village of Loders, said the cliff had actually been on fire for many years and then mysteriously went out. There was still oil in Dorset. In places it seeped out of the ground. In the 1970s some of Dorset's most beautiful countryside was being eagerly offered to oil companies by local farmers. I once told a farmer that if they didn't watch out, the peaceful valleys of Dorset would be covered with hideous oil rigs. This farmer, Lew Swineham, said, "They be having lights on them, those oil wells," and he smiled with satisfaction. "Like Christmas trees." Somehow, the oil boom missed Dorset, which made farmers like Lew Swineham very cross. For a brief period they thought they might have seen their last of muddy boots and wet silage.

"The bus just went," Roger said at the Smugglers' Inn in Osmington Mills. "That's the last one. Have a meat pie instead."

Weymouth and the Isle of Portland had been in view almost since Lulworth, for ten miles or so. They lay in the distance, through the haze, at sea level. But up here, above Weymouth Bay, there were holiday camps on the bluffs, looking more than ever like prisons. I decided that the posher they were, the more they looked like concentration camps. These were built for strength: solid walls and concrete paths and chain-link fences and barbed wire and signs warning trespassers of guard dogs. On this sunny day, fully clothed people slept on deck chairs. They had scowling, sunburned faces. I could hear them snoring from forty yards away.

Now it seemed downhill, across some cliffs and down a gully to a seawall. I walked on top of the wall the last few miles into Weymouth. I liked Weymouth immediately. It was grand without being pompous. It had a real harbor. It was full of boats. All its architecture was intact, the late-Georgian terraces facing the Esplanade and the sea, and cottages and old warehouses on the harbor. I liked the look of the houses, their elegance, and the smell of fish and beer about them. I walked around. There was plenty of space. The weather was perfect. I thought: I could live here. That thought made me happy, but the next day I left my hotel and just kept walking.

O
N THIS PART
of the coast it was easy to get out of town—any town, even a large one like Weymouth. A ten-minute walk took me through the narrow outskirts; then there were no more shops. Ten more minutes: no houses. Five minutes: no signs. And then there were only chestnut trees with plumy blossoms, and the twelve-inch path, and the sound of waves.

But here at the hamlet of Fleet there were no waves. It was a silent shore for nine miles, for just offshore, and running from Portland to Abbotsbury, was one of the strangest coastal features of Britain, the Chesil Bank. It was a low ridge of pebbles banked in the sea, a wall of little stones that was perfectly straight and parallel to the shore. The beach was on the other side. On my side, where there was no sound of surf, the lagoon called the Fleet lay still and in places was sour-green and stinking of dead eelgrass. Because of that wall of pebbles (it looked as geometric as a man-made reef, but in fact had been pushed there during the Ice Age) this was the quietest part of the English coast: no wind, no gulls, no sound of water; only the shimmer of sun on the stagnant flats.

I heard a sound—two sounds—a rapid sawing, a high muffled hee-haw, like the harsh hum of silk being woven in a clapping loom. It came closer, strengthened to a kind of breathing, though I could not place it. I listened and looked sharp, and I saw two huge swans flying low over the Fleet, beating their wings—tearing the air with them—and the sound was that of their urgent wingbeats, echoing in Gore Cove. When they were directly overhead they sounded like two lovers in a hammock.

I walked on. Past Herbury I counted fifty-seven swans swimming in the lagoon, and I took a path that led me a little inland, through sunlit woods. I looked very closely at the birds and flowers and trees in this place, and noted their names and variety, and the way the sun slanted on the glade and glanced from the sea. I tried to remember every detail, because someone had told me that a nuclear power station was planned for this place that would wipe it out.

Cutting through a pasture, I did not at first see the bullocks, but hearing their hooves, I turned and saw them following me. I walked faster. They did the same. I ran, and they ran after me, about fifteen of them, making that curious rocking motion that bullocks do when they try to hurry. When they were just behind me I dived over a fence into a bank of stinging nettles and brambles. The bullocks crowded to have a look at me. This was near Wyke Wood. I felt like a jackass, because I was out of breath and scratched and stung, and the bullocks were snorting and drooling. Behind them, down the field, there was a full-grown bull. His feet were planted firmly into the turf, and his head was lowered at me.

I told the bullocks they were stupid and nosy. They moved a few feet away, enough for me to disentangle myself from the brambles. "Don't bother me—stay there—you, too!" I said, and backed down the pasture to the gate while the big bull watched. The animals obeyed me in a reluctant way, but stubbornly, edging forward whenever I turned away.

Then I vaulted a fence and was safe. Perhaps I had never been in danger, but I had felt threatened. They began pushing at the fence as I walked on. And I thought how domestic animals are a much greater nuisance than wild animals—they are dependent and badly behaved and seem willful and obtuse.

After a few more hills I saw St. Catherine's, a lovely ruined chapel on the summit of a hill in Abbotsbury. There was a swannery in Abbotsbury, which was why I had seen so many of the birds on the shore. The village had a monkish gray stone appearance—there once had been a Benedictine monastery here—and the tithe barn and the cottages all looked as though they had been built by friars for the glory of God. In fact, it was now a village of house-proud English people who, at great expense, had restored the place and planted roses.

The path from here to West Bay and Bridport was straight along the shore, and a lovely sunset haze hung over the thatched village of Burton Bradstock, where land and water met, green and gray.

That night at the Crown Inn of Uploders I saw a sign saying rook pie. What did it mean?

Robin Upton, the landlord, said, "Ask my wife."

Shelley Upton was in her thirties and studious-looking, and she clearly enjoyed being asked about rook pie. She said, "The boys around here shoot rooks, you see. I heard their guns. I asked them what they did with the birds. They said, 'Oh, we throw them over the hedges.' I said to myself, 'If they're killing them anyway and throwing them over the hedges, one might as well find a way of cooking them and eating them.' And then I remembered a recipe for rook pie, in my
Castle's Dictionary of English Cooking.
That goes back to 1880. It's rook and onions and a homemade crust. It's very good."

I said I wanted to try some. She served it to me at the rear of the pub. The rook was dark meat, with a gamy grousey taste. I liked it very much, and her crunchy pastry, too, and the Dorset ale.

Not long after this there was a headline in the Bridport newspaper:
POISON-PEN ATTACK ON ROOK PIE COUPLE
. Apparently, a mention of Mrs. Upton's rook pie in the paper provoked a number of people to write abusive letters to the Uptons. Mr. Upton described the letters as "nasty" and the people as "nutters." He went on, "One said they hoped we died of cancer, and the other said that burning in hell was too good for us." The letters were of course from English bird-lovers, and Shelley Upton—the cheery soul in the country pub—was reported by the paper as now a nervous wreck, afraid to answer the phone or open letters.

Had Shelley Upton been a dog or cat in distress, she could have counted on the support of a pet-loving English public.