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

I agreed with him. I was always reassured when someone felt that his intelligence had been insulted by a radio or television program.

In another public house there was a television set. I drank and waited until the news came on. It was Falklands news but nothing specific.

At the bar, Mrs. Hykeham, with an old scarf yanked on her head, and puffy, smoker's eyes, said, "It's stupid for Britain to be killing fourteen-year-old boys in the Falklands. That's how old they are. There was this letter smuggled out, see. It was in the paper. It told how the little Argies were cold and scared and homesick."

She went on in this vein, and soon everyone in the bar was shouting at her. But it made her more contrary and she wouldn't budge. She seemed secretly pleased to be disagreeing with everyone, and she repeated the letter she had read and looked at the rest of them with contempt.

There was another woman in the bar. This was Mrs. Wackerfield. She had dog teeth and a way of staring. She said flatly that she was planning to go to the United States with her husband and children. She wanted to find work. Her husband knew everything about motors, and she knew about catering. Mrs. Wackerfield was not more than forty. Her husband, Richard, just sat there. He seemed to be thinking: Should Birdie be telling this bloke all these things?

"We'll go and stay for about five or six years," she said.

Her voice was London stuffy. She was drinking Pimm's.

"We'll make some money and then come home," she said.

She was very certain about everything.

"I want to go to California," she said. "It's lovely there, we've been twice. I don't want anything to do with New York, and Florida's getting spoiled. We'll sell up here and go, and start a business of some kind. We're not going to work for anyone else. We never do that. We'll save our money and then come home. I'd never think of staying there. We don't want that."

Mrs. Wackerfield continued to describe how she and Richard were going to settle in California for a while, because England was useless as far as work went, but it was her home, she said; she would come back. Richard said nothing. Now he was looking at me, perhaps wondering whether I objected to their presuming in this way. "We'll use your country for a few years and then ditch it when we've made our pile" — that was what they were saying. I did object to their presumption, but I kept my mouth shut.

I stayed in Bognor longer than I had planned. I grew to like Miss Pottage at Camelot. The beach was fine in the sunshine, and there was always an old man selling huge horrible whelks out of a wooden box on the Front. He said he caught them himself. It was sunny, but the shops were closed and the Front was deserted. The season hadn't started, people said.

I began to think that Bognor had been misrepresented. The oral tradition of travel in Britain was a shared experience of received opinion. Britain seemed small enough and discussed enough to be known at second hand. Dickens was known that way: it was an English trait to know about Dickens and Dickens' characters without ever having read him. Places were known in this same way. That was why Brighton had a great reputation and why Margate was avoided. Dover, people said, the white cliffs of Dover. And Eastbourne's lovely. And the Sink Ports, they're lovely, too. It was Dickens all over again, and with the same sort of distortions, the same prejudices, and some places they had all wrong.

"I don't know as much as I should about Dungeness," a man said to me, who didn't know anything about it at all. I went away laughing.

Broadstairs was serious, but Bognor was a joke. I was told, "It's like Edward the Seventh said" — it was George the Fifth—"his last words before he died. 'Bugger Bognor!' That's what I say." Bognor had an unfortunate name. Any English place name with bog or bottom in it was doomed. ("The bowdlerization of English place-names has been a steady development since the late eighteenth century. In Northamptonshire alone, Buttocks Booth became Booth-ville, Pisford became Pitsford, and Shitlanger was turned into Shut-langer.") Camber Sands had a nice rhythmical lilt and was seen as idyllic — but it wasn't; Bognor contained a lavatorial echo, so it was seen as scruffy — but it wasn't. All English people had opinions on which seaside places in England were pleasant and which were a waste of time. This was in the oral tradition. The English seldom traveled at random. They took well-organized vacations and held very strong views on places to which they had never been.

THE COAST for the fifty miles west of Bognor was full of pleats and tucks — harbors, channels, inlets, and Southampton Water, and the bays of Spithead. The coastal footpath around Selsey Bill gave out at one of the two Witterings. Beyond it were inconvenient islands and not enough causeways and a path made impossible by the scoops and cuts of all this water. There were no walkers here. This territory was for sailors — full of fine bays, friendly harbors, and the waterlogged geography of the Solent; all the blowing boats.

Just under the irregular coast was the Isle of Wight, shaped like the loose puzzle piece that most offshore islands resemble. I could reach it by train, taking the ferry from Portsmouth, and there was another train that went down the right-hand side of the island, from Ryde to Shanklin. I wanted to see what Henry James had called "that detestable little railway." This was the best way of skipping across the crumbs of land that made that part of the English coast from Bognor to Bournemouth so hard for the walker. I would simply take the morning train to the Isle of Wight.

I thought I might be the only passenger to Portsmouth, and was still convinced of it as we crossed the green fields to Chichester ("…a handsome Market Cross, erected in 1500, but much damaged by the Puritans") and Fishbourne, which was full of new mauve lilacs and booing children; but at Bosham, a middle-aged couple — the Lucketts — got on and seemed eager to tell me, but without appearing to boast, that they were going to Southampton to see the Queen Elizabeth II set sail for the Falklands.

"And of course we'll pop in and see my sister at the same time," Mrs. Luckett said, embarrassed by my lack of response. The Lucketts were off to wave plastic Union Jacks at a departing troopship — what was I supposed to do? Sing a chorus of "There'll Always Be an England"? "She's out at Hedge End in a maisonette. Her husband's in the transport business."

"By 'transport business' she means he's a lorry driver," Mr. Luckett said maliciously. He was not close to his brother-in-law. "Mad about CB radios," Mr. Luckett went on. "'A big ten-four to that rig, Rubber Duck.' It's the most awful cobblers."

"He travels all over the country," Mrs. Luckett said.

I said, "And you live in Bosham?"

"Bozzam," Mr. Luckett said, and I believed at the time that it was a different place.

I said, "I hope nothing happens to the Q.E. II. " The Lucketts looked up, a little startled. "I mean, in the war." They looked even more alarmed. "This Falklands business."

They seemed a little calmer when I said that. You weren't supposed to say the war, but rather this Falklands business.

"She'll be fine," Mr. Luckett said.

"Oh, yes," Mrs. Luckett said.

They were very proud, but it also occurred to me that they were going all the way to Southampton mainly because it was a beautiful sunny day and because Mrs. Luckett's sister was nearby. They told themselves they were going to cheer the Q.E. II, but I had the impression that if it had been raining, they would not have gone.

There were apple blossoms all along this pretty line, and they looked like a brilliant form of knitting — bright blown-open stitches of white yarn fastened to rain-blackened boughs. I thought at Emsworth: What a nice old-fashioned station platform, freshly painted wood and a small fireplace in the waiting room.