To the Ends of the Earth (27 page)

The clerk was watching television in the lounge—he called it a lounge. He did not speak to me. He was watching “Hill Street Blues,” a car chase, some shouting. I looked at the register and saw what I had missed before—that I was the only guest in this big, dark forty-room hotel. I went outside and wondered how to escape. Of course I could have marched in and said, “I’m not happy here—I’m checking out,” but the clerk might have made trouble and charged me. Anyway, I wanted to punish him for running such a scary place.

I walked inside and upstairs, grabbed my knapsack, and hurried to the lounge, rehearsing a story that began, “This is my bird-watching gear. I’ll be right back—” The clerk was still watching television. As I passed him (he did not look up), the hotel seemed to me the most sinister building I had ever been in. On my way downstairs I had had a moment of panic when, faced by three closed doors in a hallway, I imagined myself in one of those corridor labyrinths of the hotel in a nightmare, endlessly tramping torn carpets and opening doors to discover again and again that I was trapped.

I ran down the Promenade to the bandstand and stood panting while the band played “If You Were the Only Girl in the World.” I wondered if I had been followed by the clerk. I paid twenty pence for a deck chair, but feeling that I was being watched (perhaps it was my knapsack and oily shoes?), I abandoned the chair and continued down the Promenade. Later, I checked into the Queens Hotel, which looked vulgar enough to be safe.

Llandudno was the sort of place that inspired old-fashioned fears of seaside crime. It made me think of poisoning and suffocation, screams behind varnished doors, creatures scratching at the wainscoting. I imagined constantly that I was hearing the gasps of adulterers from the dark windows of those stuccoed terraces that served as guest houses—naked people saying gloatingly, “We shouldn’t be doing this!” In all ways, Llandudno was a perfectly preserved Victorian town. It was so splendid-looking that it took me several days to find out that it was in fact very dull.

It had begun as a fashionable watering place and developed into a railway resort. It was still a railway resort, full of people strolling on the Promenade and under the glass-and-iron canopies of the shop fronts on Mostyn Street. It had a very old steamer (“Excursions to the Isle of Man”) moored at its pier head, and very old hotels, and a choice of very old entertainments—
Old Mother Riley
at the Pavilion, the Welsh National Opera at the Astra Theatre doing
Tosca
, or Yorkshire comedians in vast saloon bars telling very old jokes. “We’re going to have a loovely boom competition,” a toothy comedian was telling his drunken audience in a public house near Happy Valley. A man was blindfolded and five girls selected, and the man had to judge—by touching them—which one’s bum was the shapeliest. It caused hilarity and howls of laughter; the girls were shy—one simply walked offstage; and at one point some men were substituted and the blindfolded man crouched and began searching the men’s bums as everyone jeered. And then the girl with the best bum was selected as the winner and awarded a bottle of carbonated cider called Pomagne.

I overheard two elderly ladies outside at the rail, looking above Llandudno Bay. They were Miss Maltby and Miss Thorn, from Glossop, near Manchester.

“It’s a nice moon,” Miss Maltby said.

“Aye,” Miss Thorn said. “It is.”

“But that’s not what we saw earlier this evening.”

“No. That was the sun.”

Miss Maltby said, “You told me it was the moon.”

“It was all that mist, you see,” Miss Thorn said. “But I know now it was the sun.”

N
OW
I
SAW
B
RITISH PEOPLE LYING STIFFLY ON THE BEACH
like dead insects, or huddled against the canvas windbreaks they hammered into the sand with rented mallets, or standing on cliffs and kicking stones roly-poly into the sea—and I thought:
They are symbolically leaving the country
.

Going to the coast was as far as they could comfortably go. It was the poor person’s way of going abroad—standing at the seaside and staring at the ocean. It took a little imagination. I believed that these people were fantasizing that they were over there on the watery horizon, at sea. Most people on the Promenade walked with their faces averted from the land. Perhaps another of their coastal pleasures was being able to turn their backs on Britain. I seldom saw anyone with his back turned to the sea (it was the rarest posture on the coast). Most people looked seaward with anxious hopeful faces, as if they had just left their native land.

T
HE REST OF THE COAST, FROM THE WINDOW OF THE TRAIN
, was low and disfigured. There were small bleak towns like Parton and Harrington, and huge horrible ones like Workington, with its steelworks—another insolvent industry. And Maryport was just sad; it had once been an important coal and iron port, and great sailing ships had been built there in Victorian times. Now it was forgotten. Today there was so little shipbuilding on the British coast it could be said not to exist at all. But that was not so odd as the fact that I saw very few vessels in these harbors and ports—a rusty freighter, a battered trawler, some plastic sailboats—there was not much more, where once there had been hundreds of seagoing vessels.

I watched for more. What I saw was ugly and interesting, but before I knew what was happening, the line cut inland, passing bramble hedges and crows in fields of silage and small huddled-together farm buildings and church steeples in distant villages. We had left the violated coast, and now the mild countryside reasserted itself. It was green farms all the way to Carlisle—pretty and extremely dull.

KESWICK PUNKS
, a scrawl said in Carlisle, blending Coleridge and Wordsworth with Johnny Rotten. But that was not so surprising. It was always in the fine old provincial towns and county seats that one saw the wildest-looking youths, the pink-haired boys and the girls in leopard-skin tights, the nose jewels and tattooed earlobes. I had seen green hair and swastikas in little Llanelli. I no longer felt that place names like Taunton or Exeter or Bristol were evocative of anything but graffiti-covered walls, like those of noble Carlisle, crowned with a castle and with
enough battlements and city walls to satisfy the most energetic vandal.
VIOLENT REVOLUTION
, it said, and
THE EXPLOITED
and
ANARCHY
and
SOCIAL SCUM
. Perhaps they were pop groups?
THE REJECTS, THE DEFECTS, THE OUTCASTS, THE DAMNED
, and some bright new swastikas and
THE BARMY ARMY
. And on the ancient walls,
SKINHEADS RULE!

Some of it was hyperbole, I supposed, but it was worth spending a day or so to examine it. It fascinated me as much as did the motorcycle gangs, who raced out of the oak forests and country lanes to terrorize villagers or simply to sit in a thatch-roofed pub, averting their sullen dirty faces. I did not take it personally when they refused to talk to me. They would not talk to anyone. They were English, they were country folk, they were shy. They were dangerous only by the dozen; individually they were rather sweet and seemed embarrassed to be walking down the High Street of dear old Haltwhistle in leather jackets inscribed
HELL’S ANGELS
or
THE DAMNED
.

The graffiti suggested that England—perhaps the whole of Britain—was changing into a poorer, more violent place. And it was easier to see this deterioration on the coast and in the provincial towns than in a large city. The messages were intended to be shocking, but England was practically unshockable, so the graffiti seemed merely a nuisance, an insult. And that was how I began to think of the whole country; if I had only one word to describe the expression of England’s face I would have said: insulted.

I
EXPECTED FORMALITIES—CUSTOMS AND IMMIGRATION
—Larne was so foreign-seeming, so dark and dripping, but there was not even a security check; just a gangway and the
wet town beyond it. I wandered the streets for an hour, feeling like Billy Bones, and then rang the bell at a heavy-looking house displaying a window card saying
VACANCIES
. I had counted ten others, but this one I could tell had big rooms and big armchairs.

“Just off the ferry?” It was Mrs. Fraser Wheeney, plucking at her dress, hair in a bun, face like a seal pup—pouty mouth, soulful eyes, sixty-five years old; she had been sitting under her own pokerwork,
REJOICE IN THE LORD ALWAYS
, waiting for the doorbell to ring. “Twenty-one-fifteen it came in—been looking around town?”

Mrs. Wheeney knew everything, and her guest house was of the in-law sort—oppression and comfort blended, like being smothered with a pillow. But business was terrible: only one other room was taken. Why, she could remember when, just after the ferry came in, she would have been turning people away! That was before the recent troubles, and what a lot of harm they’d done! But Mrs. Wheeney was dead tired and had things on her mind—the wild storm last night.

“Thonder!” she thundered. “It opened up me hud!”

We were walking upstairs under a large motto—
FOR GOD SO LOVED THE WORLD
, and so forth.

“It gave me huddicks!”

The house was full of furniture, and how many floors? Four or five anyway, and pianos on some of them, and there was an ottoman, and a wing chair, and pokerwork scenes from the Old Testament, Noah possibly, and was that Abraham and Isaac? The whole house was dark and varnished and gleaming—the smell of varnish still powerful, with the sizzle of a coal fire. It was June in Northern Ireland, so only one room had a fire trembling in the grate.

“And it went through me neighbor’s roof,” she said, still talking about the storm, the thunder and lightning.

Another flight of stairs, heavy carpet, more Bible mottoes, an armchair on the landing.

“Just one more,” Mrs. Wheeney said. “This is how I get me exercise. Oh, it was turrible. One of me people was crying—”

Mirrors and antlers and more mottoes and wood paneling,
and now I noticed that Mrs. Wheeney had a mustache. She was talking about the
reeyun
—how hard it was; about breakfast at
eeyut
—but she would be up at
sux;
and what a dangerous
suttee
Belfast was.

CHRIST JESUS CAME INTO THE WORLD TO SAVE SINNERS
was the motto over my bedstead, in this enormous drafty room, and the bed was a great slumping trampoline. Mrs. Wheeney was saying that she had not slept a wink all the previous night. It was the thunder and the poor soul in number eight, who was scared to death.

“It’s funny how tired you get when you miss a night’s sleep.” she said. “Now me, I’m looking forward to going to bed. Don’t worry about the money. You can give me the five pounds tomorrow.”

The rain had started again and was hitting the window with a swish like sleet. It was like being among the Jumblies, on a dark and rainy coast. They were glad to see aliens here, and I was happy among these strangers.

I
KNEW AT ONCE THAT
B
ELFAST WAS AN AWFUL CITY
. I
T HAD A
bad face—moldering buildings, tough-looking people, a visible smell, too many fences. Every building that was worth blowing up was guarded by a man with a metal detector who frisked people entering and checked their bags. It happened everywhere, even at dingy entrances, at buildings that were not worth blowing up, and, again and again, at the bus station, the railway station. Like the bombs themselves, the routine was frightening, then fascinating, then maddening, and then a bore—but it went on and became a part of the great waste motion of Ulster life. And security
looked like parody, because the whole place was already scorched and broken with bomb blasts.

It was so awful I wanted to stay. It was a city that was so demented and sick that some aliens mistook its desperate frenzy for a sign of health, never knowing it was a death agony. It had always been a hated city. “There is no aristocracy—no culture—no grace—no leisure worthy of the name,” Sean O’Faolain wrote in his
Irish Journey
. “It all boils down to mixed grills, double whiskies, dividends, movies, and these strolling, homeless, hate-driven poor.” But if what people said was true, that it really was one of the nastiest cities in the world, surely then it was worth spending some time in, for horror interest?

I lingered a few days, marveling at its decrepitude, and then vowed to come back the following week. I had never seen anything like it. There was a high steel fence around the city center, and that part of Belfast was intact, because to enter it, one had to pass through a checkpoint—a turnstile for people, a barrier for cars and buses. More metal detectors, bag searches, and questions: lines of people waited to be examined so that they could shop, play bingo, or go to a movie.

I
BEGAN TO DEVELOP A HABIT OF ASKING DIRECTIONS, FOR THE
pleasure of listening to them.

“Just a munnut,” a man in Bushmills said. His name was Emmett; he was about sixty-odd and wore an old coat. He had a pound of bacon in his hand, and pressing the bacon to the side of his head in a reflective way, he went on.

“Der’s a wee wudden brudge under the car park. And der’s a bug one farder on—a brudge for trums. Aw, der
used to be trums up and down! Aw, but they is sore on money and unded it. Lussun, ye kyan poss along da strond if the tide is dine. But walk on da odder side whar der’s graws.” He moved the bacon to his cheek. “But it might be weyat!”

“What might be wet?”

“Da graws,” Mr. Emmett said.

“Long grass?”

“In its notral styat.”

This baffled me for a while—
notral styat
—and then I thought:
Of course, in its natural state!

Kicking through bracken, I pushed on and decided to head for the Giant’s Causeway.