The Kingdom by the Sea (15 page)

But these were minor matters. The play was done with gusto, and the audience enjoyed it—they found it funny, they laughed, and they were moved by the romantic parts. It was a comedy about a union. In Britain they needed a comedy about a union. The cast was numerous and, judging from the program notes, they were all amateurs—clerks, shop assistants, accountants, teachers. The interpretation was shaky, but there was a clear understanding of American culture among the players—far greater than any equivalent group would have shown in the United States.

Plays in England were seen to be a suitable outlet for the emotions. The English liked dressing up; they liked the clubby community of amateur dramatics; they enjoyed the pressure and teamwork of play production. For the duration of the play they were released from their lives and their work; they could shout and sing, they could express misery or joy; there was no such thing as a class system. They were free. So it struck me that even
The Pajama Game
in Teignmouth fulfilled the oldest reason for having a play: it was cathartic, and afterward everyone, players and spectators alike, felt much better.

Back at the guest house Mrs. Starling introduced me to George Windus, who had sidewhiskers and baggy pants and a florid face. I suspected that Mrs. Starling hoped that Mr. Windus would ask the questions she was too timid to risk.

"What brings you to Teignmouth then?" Mr. Windus said. His nose was swollen, the color of the Burgundy he was drinking.

I was in publishing, I said. I had a week off. I was traveling along the coast.

"What do you think?" Mr. Windus said, and pinched his whiskers.

"Folkestone's nice," I said.

"Folkestone!" he roared, and Mrs. Starling blinked.

Now he spoke to Mrs. Starling, whose hands were clasped at her throat. Her mouth was small and uncertain, and her dark eyes watchful. Her hair was rumpled—ringlets in disarray—and very attractive.

Mr. Windus was still shouting. "Twenty-five years ago I was in Folkestone! I wasn't above twenty-seven years old. I was there with my wife, staying on the top floor of a hotel—five flights up. On the day we left, I parked my Land-Rover at the front door to make it easy for us to pack up. We were loading and then out of nowhere came a furious little woman! She said to me, 'Parking that horrible motor out there at the entrance—you're lowering the tone of this hotel! Oh, you're lowering the tone!'"

This made Mrs. Starling twitch.

Mr. Windus turned to me and said, "No, Folkestone is not nice!"

***

It was raining hard the next day—too wet for walking. I was no adventurer—so I bought a one-way ticket on the fast train to Plymouth. Once, this was called the Cornish Riviera Express, on the Great Western Railway; now it was the Inter-City 125 on British Rail. I sat in second class and looked at Devon. Most of the passengers were old people, starting vacations. They talked very loud. I sometimes had the impression that the whole of southern England was full of deaf people talking much too loud.

The rain came down. We went along the north bank of the muddy Teign to Newton Abbot, which looked very ugly in the storm. We set off again at a good clip.

"There's none of that old-time noise," Mr. Purewell said. "No whistles and bells and that. It can play tricks on you! You're saying goodbye to someone, and the train just pulls out and surprises you. There's no warning! But I've got a great appreciation for these One-Two-Fives and"—he paused; we went a mile; he resumed—"I used to be a bit puzzled why they were called that. I asked a few people. And then I was told it was their maximum speed."

We were in the tame and gentle hills of Devon, near Totnes ("It consists mainly of one long congested street with many old houses with interesting interiors..."). Here the rain made the landscape mild, and sheep grazed near flowering hedgerows, and from the railway tracks to the horizon there were ten shades of green.

"I gave up smoking," Mr. Gussage said. "The queer thing was it had never entered my head to do it! But it was budget time, you see. I went into my tobacconist for my usual tin and he said, 'We've been sold out for a fortnight.' Then I thought of giving up. I'd nothing to smoke—they were out of Three Nuns. And I managed. Now if anyone smokes in my house, I open the windows. It don't half make a house dirty—smoke. Sometimes, with people smoking, I can hardly see across the room."

Lloyd Gifford was Mr. Gussage's friend. They were bound for Plymouth and a guest house near the Hoe. They were in their seventies and carrying on a shouted conversation.

Mr. Gifford said, "My father smoked! He loved his pipe, my father. I remember what he smoked. It was called Ogden's. The tin was orange. There was a picture of an Indian on it. On his birthday, or at Christmas, we always gave him a tin of Ogden's. He loved his pipe."

Mr. Gifford, telling the story, had made himself sad. But Mr. Gussage had heard "Christmas" and was off.

"I've finished with all present-giving!" he shouted. "And I don't want to get any. I said to myself, 'I've decided now that I've moved permanently I don't want to get any presents.' I wrote everyone a letter saying, 'Please don't send me any gifts—just send me a suitable card.'"

Mr. Gifford was still damp-eyed with the memory of his father, the pipe, the tins of Ogden's. He said nothing to his companion.

"And do you know?" Mr. Gussage said. "They were relieved!"

Side by side on another seat were Mr. Bleaberry and Mr. Crake. They were also old; they were also shouting.

"First thing I do after we get settled in," Mr. Bleaberry said, "and if it's not raining, we'll go to the station and get timetables. I like to be up to date with my timetables."

This set Mr. Crake thinking. At last he said, "We used to go everywhere, my wife and I." There was a silence. "And that probably added fire to the fuel."

Dartmoor was on the right—the high rounded hill called Ugborough Beacon standing near other sudden bulges. In the meadows on the left side of the track lambs were fleeing from the train.

Raymond Greasely had been talking ever since the train had pulled out of Newton Abbot. Now he was saying, "...and my daughter is the pastoral assistant. There's a pastor, so she's the pastoral assistant. When she gets through with her studies she'll be a reverend. And she's still doing her journalism. How she does it all, I don't know. There's an abbey near her and the combined churches got together. I don't know about the Catholics. I think they stayed out. They always do, don't they? They call it a sin if they join up with anyone else. There was one big service at the abbey, everyone except the Catholics. My daughter's job, as pastoral assistant, was to read the lessons, two lessons. I'll bet she got a thrill out of that..."

A small old hunched-over man named Cox had sat in a rear seat and said nothing. He was looking out the window. What was it about train windows that made people remember? Train windows seemed to mirror the past. Mr. Cox stared and saw his face. After a time, even this very silent man spoke up.

"It's funny," he said, seeming to waken. "I've never shouted before or since, but I said to him, 'Stop picking on me—find someone else to pick on! I won't take any more of this from you!' It just came out. I was mad. He was a bully. Some people are never happier than when they're picking on someone. After that, when he came to check on my fire extinguisher"—what was that?—"he was very nice to me, we always had a chat."

This memory seemed to embarrass the others, but Mr. Cox was happy and even seemed to be savoring it.

"I think it's a detestable thing, picking on someone," he said. "I tried to bottle it up, but it made me bad-tempered. Then I shouted at him. It was the only time in my life. It just came out."

After the villages of Devon, Plymouth looked vast. It was scattered over several valleys, and farther in, it was on the hills as well. It was only the larger towns and cities of England that covered hills like this. The Plymouth outskirts looked ugly and dull.

"Busy, built-up place," Mr. Gussage said. "I remember my mother and father came to my wedding. They were country people, and this was Brighton. They said, 'Look at all them slate roofs!'"

Mr. Gifford was staring at Plymouth. He said, "Yes. Look at all them slate roofs."

A
SPECIAL TRAIN TICKET
I bought in Plymouth called the Cornish Explorer allowed me to go anywhere in Cornwall, on any train. I traveled into the low shaggy hills, which were full of tumbling walls and rough stone houses and yellow explosions of gorse bushes. I had lunch for £8 ($14), which was twice as much as my ticket. The dining car was set for eighteen people, but I was the only diner. Elsewhere on the train, the English sat eating their sandwiches out of bags, munching apples, and salting hard-boiled eggs. Times were hard. I realized that my lunch was overpriced, yet in a very short time there would be no more four-course lunches on these trains, no more rattling silverware, and no waiter ladling soup. But it was also ridiculous for me to be the only person eating: soup, salad, roast chicken and bread sauce, apple crumble, cheese and biscuits, coffee. There were two waiters in the dining car, and a cook and his assistant in the kitchen. The meal that most long-distance railway passengers had once taken for granted had now become a luxury, and Major Uprichard would soon be telling his grandchildren, "I can remember when there were waiters on trains—yes,
waiters!
"

There were rolling hills until Redruth, and then the land was bleak and bumpy. There was only one working tin mine left in Cornwall (near St. Just), but the landscape was scattered with abandoned mineworks, which looked like ruined churches in ghost villages. Cornwall was peculiarly uneven, with trees growing sideways out of stony ground, and many solitary cottages. On a wet day, its granite was lighted by a granite-colored sky, and the red roads gleamed in a lurid way; it looked to be the most haunted place in England, and then its reputation for goblins seemed justified. It was also one of those English places which constantly reminded the alien, with visual shocks like vast battered cliffs and china-clay waste dumps and the evidence of desertion and ruin, that he was far from home. It looked in many places as if the wind had screamed it of all its trees.

"I love the red earth," Mrs. Mumby said, staring out the train window at the drizzle and reminiscing. "During the war I lived at Ross-on-Wye, in an antiquated old cottage. These Cornish cottages remind me of that. I don't like the architecture of today. Concrete jungle, I call it."

Appearing to reply to this, Vivian Greenup said sharply, "I've looked everywhere for my husband's walking stick. My daughter brought it to the hospital in case he might need it. After he died, I looked everywhere and couldn't find it."

Mrs. Mumby stared at Mrs. Greenup, and her expression seemed to say: Why is Vivian running on like this about her dead husband's walking stick?

"It's quite a weapon," Mrs. Greenup said. "You could use it as a weapon."

We came to Penzance ("somewhat ambitiously styled the 'Cornish Riviera'...John Davison, the Scottish poet, drowned himself here"). I changed trains and went back up the line about seven miles to St. Erth, and there I waited in the rain for the next train to St. Ives.

There were few pleasures in England that could beat the small three-coach branch-line train, like this one from St. Erth to St. Ives. And there was never any question that I was on a branch-line train, for it was only on these trains that the windows were brushed by the branches of the trees that grew close to the tracks. Branch-line trains usually went through the woods. It was possible to tell from the sounds at the windows—the branches pushed the glass like mops and brooms—what kind of a train it was. You knew a branch line with your eyes shut.

We went along the River Hayle and paused at the station called Leland Saltings, which faced green-speckled mudflats. Hayle was across the water, with a mist lying over it. There were two more stops—it was a short line—and then the semicircle of St. Ives. It was Cornish, unadorned, a gray, huddled, storm-lit town on several hills and a headland, with a beach in its sheltered harbor. Today, in the rain, it was quiet, except for the five species of gulls that were as numerous now as when W. H. Hudson was here and wrote about them.

All the great coastal towns of England were a mixture of the sublime and the ridiculous. Here was the sublime climate and the pearly light favored by watercolorists, the sublime bay of St. Ives and the sublime lighthouse that inspired Virginia Woolf to write one of her greatest novels, and the sublime charm of the twisty streets and stone cottages. And there was the ridiculous: the postcards with kittens in the foreground of harbor scenes, the candy shops with authentic local fudge, the bumper stickers, the sweatshirts with slogans printed on them, the souvenir pens and bookmarks and dishtowels, and the shops full of bogus handicrafts, carved crosses and pendants. These carvings at St. Ives advertised "Our Celtic Heritage—The Celts were famous for their courage and fighting qualities, which carried them before the birth of Christ from their homeland north of the Alps, across the known world ..." Cornish pride was extraordinary, and it was more than pride. It had fueled a nationalist movement, and though the last Cornish-speaking person died in 1777 (it was Dolly Pentreath of Mousehole), and Cornish culture today was little more than ghost stories and meat pies, there was a fairly vigorous campaign being fought for Cornwall to secede from England altogether. It was not for a vague alien like myself to say this was ridiculous, but it did seem to me very strange.

Across St. Ives Bay were sandy cliffs and dunes, and I thought of walking along that shore to the village of Portreath: it was about twelve miles; I could do it before nightfall. But the rain was coming darkly down like a shower of smut, and I still had my Cornish Explorer ticket. So I walked to St. Ives Head, where the Atlantic was riotous; then I returned to the station to wait for the little train to take me back to St. Erth.

The graffiti at St. Ives Station said,
Wogs ought to be hit about the head with the utmost severity,
and under this,
Niggers run amok
in London
—
St. Ives next!
and in a different hand,
Racism is a social disease—you should see a doctor.