Paul Theroux: The Kingdom by the Sea: A Journey Around the Coast of Great Britain

Down Pulsifier Road and across Albert Street to Saltwood Grove — or names like that — where I asked a lady taking in her wash, "Which way to the station?" And it seemed funny that this was travel, necessitating a knapsack, binoculars, and a knife — and I had a plastic poncho, too! Not here, but sometimes, even on a small suburban road, with a man clipping a hedge and a girl in a school uniform and a whistling mailman, it seemed as foreign and far-off as Gangtok, though often not so safe, since in Sikkim murder is unknown. But it was travel, perhaps in a new sense but in an old place, because I was looking hard at it for the first time and making notes, and because I had no other business there.

The Romney, Hythe, and Dymchurch Railway was one of the narrowest and smallest in Britain, running from Hythe to Dungeness on fifteen-inch tracks. A sign at the station said, NEXT TRAIN AT 17:10, and it was just after five; but the station was locked.

Marjorie Gait at a tea stall nearby said, "That stationmaster is barmy. Sometimes he doesn't open at all. Sometimes he's there at midnight."

But I waited a few more minutes, and the train pulled in, whistling — a steam train, which looked like a toy but had been built to last. A man unlocked the station and beckoned me to the ticket window. I waited there. I was the only traveler.

There was a little placard stuck to the ticket window:

Places of Interest Along the Line—

Dymchurch:

Bingo, small gift shop

New Romney:

Main Railway Station

Greatstone:

Sandy beach

Romney Sands:

Holiday Camp

Lade:

Fish and Chip Shop Public Conveniences

Dungeness:

Lighthouse

Then the shutter went up and I bought a one-way ticket to New Romney from a man with greasy hands — he was the engineer, as well. He seemed a little surprised that it wasn't a round-trip ticket, since this railway was used mainly by joyriders and was kept in business by tourists. The two other passengers that evening were merely returning to New Romney and had come here to Hythe for fun, which was why they had not gotten off the train.

From the dawdling open car, where I sat with my feet up, in the cool empty light that slowed everything it touched this spring evening, I saw sheep and horses, wheatfields with breezes swimming through them, and small houses built close to the ground. At Dymchurch there were yellow fields, one of the pleasures of May in England, the brightest crop: a whole field brimful of vivid gold mustard flowers. And beyond it, on the right-hand side of the tracks, under the lowering haze of a dusty day, ten miles of Romney Marsh. It was a drained marsh, an expanse of flat, fertile pastures. Henry James, who lived just to the southwest, at Rye, wrote that its charms were "revealed best to a slow cyclist," and he listed them: "little lonely farms, red and grey; little mouse-colored churches; little villages that seem made only for long shadows and summer afternoons. Brookland, Old Romney, Ivychurch, Dymchurch — they have positively the prettiest names."

At New Romney, no longer a port, the evening sunlight made the sky slant like a pale lid, so I had time to walk east to the beach and village there, Littlestone-on-Sea. It was no more than some bungalows and a dead tree full of crows and two terraces of old tall houses on a beach where the tide made the pebbles rattle like marbles in a jar. There was no wind — unusual, the hotel manager told me. "The wind never stops." The absence of wind seemed to prolong the daylight, and Littlestone was as calm as a lakefront.

The lady from the front desk, Mrs. Turgis, showed me to my room and hesitated and then sat on my bed and said, "You'll want this switched off," and moved her slender finger against a toggle on the wall. "The intercom," she explained; "when it's on we can hear everything that happens."

"Me talking to myself," I said.

"Or you might have a young lady in here," Mrs. Turgis said.

"Is that likely?" I said.

"And then you wouldn't want anyone to hear," she said, and smiled. She was sitting on my pillow.

All day I had been traveling on sore feet with the sun against my face, marveling at the easy language, the strange shore. But Littlestone-on-Sea was not far from London. Being here — being anywhere in England after dark — was a little like being lost.

Mrs. Turgis stood up quickly, as if she had just remembered something, and went to the door. "If you need anything, just—" and she smiled.

"I sure will" — in those words, because traveling had turned me back into an American.

The 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 Maid-stone, 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 I 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."

***

Walking south from Littlestone was drearier in sunshine than it would have been in fog or rain, because the bright light exposed every woeful bungalow and every dusty garden, and it showed how in places there was nothing at all but pebbles. A little bad weather would have made it all a little mysterious and interesting. The sunlight made it plainly awful. This strip of bungalows went all the way to Dungeness and seemed to turn the corner. I could see this through my binoculars. I did not know then that the strip of bungalows was continuous for hundreds of miles of coast, all the way along southern England to Land's End.