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

At Hastings, he said, "I'm glad I won't be around to see it."

English people of a certain class often said things like this, taking a satisfaction in the certainty of death, because dying was a way of avoiding the indignity of what they imagined would be a grim future for them. They seemed to say: If you're vain enough to wish for a long life, you deserve to suffer!

***

A man in Hastings said to me, "Why did I come here to live? That's easy. Because it is one of the three cheapest places in England." He told me the other two, but in my enthusiasm to know more about Hastings I forgot to write the others down. This man was the painter John Bratby. He did the paintings for the movie The Horse's Mouth, and his own life somewhat resembled that of Gully Jimson, the painter-hero of the Joyce Cary novel on which the movie was based.

Mr. Bratby was speaking in a room full of paintings, some of them still wet. He said, "I could never buy a house this large in London or anywhere else. I'd have a poky flat if I didn't live in Hastings."

His house was called the Cupola and Tower of the Winds, and it matched its name. It was tall and crumbling, and it creaked when the wind blew, and there were stacks of paintings leaning against every wall. Mr. Bratby was thickset and had the listening expression of a forgetful man. He said he painted quickly. He sometimes referred to his famous riotous past — so riotous, it had nearly killed him. He had been a so-called kitchen sink painter with a taste for drawing rooms. Now he lived in a quiet way. He said he believed that Western society was doomed, but he said this as he looked out of his Cupola window at the rooftops and the sea of Hastings, a pleasant view.

"Our society is changing from one based on the concept of the individual and freedom," Mr. Bratby said, "to one where the individual is nonexistent — lost in a collectivist state."

I said I didn't think it would be a collectivist state so much as a wilderness in which most people lived hand to mouth, and the rich would live like princes — better than the rich had ever lived, except that their lives would constantly be in danger from the hungry predatory poor. AH the technology would serve the rich, but they would need it for their own protection and to ensure their continued prosperity. The poor would live like dogs. They would be dangerous and pitiful, and the rich would probably hunt them for sport.

This vision of mine did not rouse Mr. Bratby, who was at that moment painting my portrait—"There is no commercial consideration to this at all." He had said of my painting, "This is for posterity to see, when our society has completely changed." He did not reject my description of the future. He scratched his head and went on dreading a police state where everyone wore baggy blue suits and called each other "Comrade" — the Orwell nightmare, which was a warning rather than a reasonable prediction. Anyway, it was almost 1984, and here was J. Bratby in a delightful wreck of a house, painting his heart out in Hastings, the bargain paradise of the south coast!

It seemed to me that his fear of the future was actually a hatred of the present, and yet he was an otherwise cheery soul and full of projects ("Guess what it is — the long one. It's all the Canterbury pilgrims. Chaucer, you see.") He said he never traveled but that his wife was very keen on it — had always wanted to go to New Orleans, for some reason. Now, his wife, Pam, was very attentive. She wore red leather trousers and made me a bacon sandwich. Bratby said that he had met her through a lonely hearts column, one of those classified ads that say Lonely gent, 54, stout but not fat, a painter by profession, south coast, wishes to meet … In this way they had met and had hit it off and gotten married.

Hastings was full of painters. "It's the cheapness and the big houses, and the light is super," Mick Rooney told me. He painted pictures of restaurant interiors — waiters, people having tea, enormous meals. He had started on Indian restaurants, all the ones called the Taj Mahal or Bengal Tandoori; black proprietors and orange meals. They were packed with people and décor and bright colors. But I bought Café, a skinny old man eating a fried egg behind & greasy window, because it looked like Margate. Rooney was one of those rare artists whose work it was possible to praise without telling baldfaced lies about the pictures having motion and a sort of nervous eloquence and a quality of leaky objectivity and, oh shoot! a kind of brooding beauty.

Writers are painful friends, and they are seldom friendly with each other. They are insecure in the presence of other writers. Composers of certain kinds of music are the same — tormented and intolerant. Yet some arts not only make the artist social but make him depend on sociability in order to succeed. Painting is one. Painters strike me as having warm uncomplicated friendships and probably more natural generosity than the practitioners of any other art. Perhaps this is because painting is such a portable, flexible thing. Painters paint outdoors, or in rooms full of people; they paint their lovers, alone, naked; they paint and eat; they paint and listen to the radio. It is a soothing way of doing your job.

It seemed to me that this was how the painters passed the time on the steep streets of Hastings. Mick was painting Indian restaurant scenes; Bratby was doing portraits of the living in anticipation of Armageddon; Gus Cummins was doing green skulls; his wife, Angie, was doing lovers reclining in front of mirrors; and others were doing the fishermen at Old Town and the sea monsters at nearby Fairlight. They were all good friends and boon companions, living cheaply in large decaying houses with lots of children and cats. They had plenty of talent and some success, but this was England, after all, where no one — least of all a good painter — was really rewarded or punished; in England, whatever your profession, you made your own life.

The painters brightened Hastings, and it seemed to me full of energy and industry and good humor, just the sort of place to recommend to a sensitive friend or relation with an artistic bent. All this and salubrious air, from Cliff End to Bulverhythe!

I was eating two pigeons in a restaurant with Rooney and praising the town one night, when at the mention of a person I had found particularly good-natured, Rooney looked doubtful.

"You may be right," Rooney said, implying that I was completely mistaken.

"Sarah Milverton — that lady you introduced me to — she seemed just the sort of secure fulfilled person—"

"Don't," Rooney said. "Her husband died a week ago. Cancer. And he'd been manic for eight years."

"How manic?"

"Doing his nut — that's how manic. He heard voices for eight years. That's a lot of voices. Sarah's had a terrible time."

I said, "What about that guy telling the jokes — Orlock?"

He said, "You noticed no one laughed at the jokes?"

This was true, and now that I thought of it, Orlock had seemed a trifle frenzied in his joke-telling. But it had been a drunken meal, confirming my impression of Hastings as an artists' colony full of optimistic romance and spirited intimacy.

"You noticed his bandage?"

No, I had not seen Orlock's bandage.

"It was on his arm — his whole arm. Seventeen stitches," Rooney said. He looked at me as though at a child, pitying my innocence, smiling despairingly at what he had to tell me, regretting that the subject had come up. "Orlock tried to kill himself this morning with a razor."

But I still liked Hastings, and I would have stayed longer, except that I had as yet seen very little of the British coast. There was so much of it ahead of me that I sometimes had the urge to cut and run — simply get on an express train and make a dash for Wales, or fly to Scotland and forget Ulster. But I had vowed to make my way slowly around the whole coast, and so one rainy morning Rooney walked east with me along the Promenade.