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

Warblington was no more than a short platform — a halt behind a town, no station — and there was a man in a little narrow box selling tickets, and another man with a flag. Whenever I saw too many railwaymen and not many passengers, I thought: They're going to axe this train. The car was soon empty. The Lucketts changed at Havant for Southampton. I could have gotten off at Havant, too, and waited ten minutes and been back in Clapham Junction in time for lunch. That was another hard thing about traveling in England — the short distances, the fast trains, the easy access — always a clear shot to London — and the sad gravitational pull of home.

But I stuck to the train and went in search of some more Lucketts. Anyone else planning a send-off for British troops? I did not find anyone, but scratched on the train door was a recent message: The Argentines are Wankers — Bomb the Barstards.

***

After spending two hours in the city in 1879, Henry James concluded, "Portsmouth is dirty, but it is also dull." He had been there trying to confirm the "familiar theory that seaport towns abound in local color, in curious types, in the quaint and the strange." He found Portsmouth "sordid," and he did not soften toward the town until he saw the harbor.

History had not altered Portsmouth, much less enhanced it. Passing from Portsmouth and Southsea Station to Portsmouth Harbour Station, the train crossed Commercial Road. Charles Dickens was born on this road in 1812. But Dickens' birthplace was just a torrent of traffic on a thoroughfare that looked like the Balls Pond Road. This was the coast on which you saw a plaque saying, "In a House on This Spot, the Poet Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote 'Grant, O Darkling Woods, My Sweet Repose,'" and you looked up and saw a gas station.

Portsmouth was associated with Nicholas Nickleby, H. G. Wells, and Captain Marryat. Charles II was married here, Conan Doyle invented Sherlock Holmes here, and Rudyard Kipling was so unhappy here that, at the age of five, he told the hag who was looking after him that he wanted to strangle her, and for the rest of his life referred to that woman's residence as "the House of Desolation." But none of this made the town of Portsmouth visibly interesting, because nothing could. Like most British seaport towns, Portsmouth was its harbor. It was wrong to look behind the harbor for anything better.

This harbor was choppy with the crisscrossed wakes of gunboats coming and going, their flags flying and their sailors scrambling over their decks. I identified this activity with the Falklands news, and I assumed these boats were setting out that day for the South Atlantic. Portsmouth Harbour contained a flotilla of Royal Navy ships, giving solemn hoots on their horns. Looking north toward the Royal Dockyard I could see the topmost sections of the masts of H.M.S. Victory, but it was the gunboats in the harbor that were bucking the waves. These days, many harbors I saw looked self-important and purposeful and overcautious: they were battle-ready. The Falklands War depended almost entirely on the strength of the British fleet, and it had brought the cold excitement of patriotism to these harbors.

South of the harbor mouth, the Isle of Wight was a long flat shadow in the morning mist. I bought a ticket to Shanklin and boarded the ferry Southsea. It was a windy crossing of Spithead, the waves were blue-black and the sea froth was being whipped from their peaks. We sailed toward Ryde, which even at this distance I could tell was an old-fashioned place, for its skyline was church spires. And that was always a good sign, the steeples and spires; the most heartening aspect of any of these coastal towns was a skyline in which spires predominated. I liked walking into these places; I was always happier seeing church spires, even though I did not regard myself as religious and seldom entered a church. I was sometimes betrayed by this impression. In some towns the church had been sold and was now a craft center or a movie theater. What to do with a defunct church was always a problem in England. Muslims occasionally petitioned for the church to be sold to them so that they could turn it into a mosque, but the request was always turned down. It seemed too much like defilement to worship Allah at St. Cuthbert's. Instead, the church was made into a bingo hall, or else torn down and a gas station built in its place.

The Isle of Wight was too far from the mainland to be commercially useful. It was picturesque, it received visitors, old folks went there to retire. It was to be stared at and admired. Before I went there I imagined that it was like a tabletop, with a simple beauty — flat, and plenty of grass; a park planted in the ocean. I was surprised to see that Ryde was fairly large. It was Victorian brown brick, redder where it was more recent, stacked against the hillside — I had been wrong in imagining it flat — and Ryde had the coiled streets that were peculiar to the coastal towns on the Isle of Wight.

Henry James loathed the train here, calling it "a gross impertinence… an objectionable conveyance." The railway was so ugly and the island so pretty that the sight of this "obtrusive" thing was "as painful as it would be to see a pedlar's pack on the shoulders of a lovely woman."

It is an odd image, especially as there were many lovely women on the Isle of Wight when I was there, and as they were members of the Ramblers Association, they were wearing the sort of knapsacks that James found so painfully inappropriate. In fact, it singled them out as hearty and independent and easygoing. As for the detestable train, it was a great deal more comfortable and cheaper and less noisy than the numerous clumsy buses that crowded the island's roads. A hundred years ago the train looked like a foolish novelty, but now the narrow unimproved carriage roads were no more than dangerous chutes down which tourist buses and swaying double-deckers and plump long-distance coaches went much too fast, and on many roads only one vehicle could pass at a time. One of the most popular topics of conversation on the Isle of Wight was the dreadful traffic and the slow progress on the bad roads. People had come here intending to escape these terrors.

The train was a hand-me-down, or more properly another retiree: it had served its time on the London Underground and been taken out of service, and now it was in active retirement, plying back and forth from Ryde to Shanklin. It was from the thirties; it had that look, very plain and rather dark and full of handles and belts for straphangers; and it was rattly and had a London smell of cigarettes and brake dust. But it was still very serviceable. There were eighty girls in my car, heading for Sandown, a school outing from Hampshire: they were small fat-faced girls, flushed from shouting, with damp hair and steamy glasses. They had been yelling all the way across Spithead on the ferry. They were being watched with disapproval by exhausted-looking holiday people, the arriving couples on their way to Ventnor, and by middle-aged men carrying handbags. It hardly mattered that we were crossing the Isle of Wight. This train might have been going from Clapham to Waterloo on the Northern Line in London, the passengers were so shabby and unenthusiastic. The schoolgirls were schoolgirls. The English could appear to bring no joy at all to a vacation, and so they looked appropriate here on this old Underground train.

But now the metropolitan train was in the sticks, crossing fields that were bounded by low woods, and at the foot of a high down was Brading ("a decayed town," the guidebook said). There were real hills and real valleys near Sandown — who would have thought this small island could contain the best kind of English landscape? Shanklin was a large and breezy town, built on sloping streets. It was the last stop. I bought an apple and a sandwich — my usual lunch — and took them down to the beach to eat. The beach was some distance below the town. It was sunny enough today for me to sit on the sand and, like the elderly people on the benches behind me, and the old folks on the Esplanade, read the Falklands news in the paper. These days it was bombing missions and aerial dogfights, just the sort of thing to gladden the hearts of the army veterans on the park benches of Shanklin.