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

There were deep rural valleys all the way to Ventnor. I had decided to treat the Isle of Wight in the same way as England, and to make my way around the island's coast. Ventnor was an English resort in an Italian setting, the town tucked into bluffs and straggling along terraces and drooping from ledges. The way it cascaded from cliffs was Italian, and the balconies were Italian, and the tall windows, too.

I kept looking for the wilder, woodier stretches of coast or smaller settlements, but all I saw were piled-up towns and congested harbors and, on remote clifftops, sprawling hotels and stairways hacked into the seawall. The Isle of Wight's southern coast was entirely high cliffs, so it had been civilized with stairs. But this built-upon coast was interesting, and whatever else one could say about the appalling traffic, it was also interesting, as the shallys in Hove were, and the people staring seaward from their cars, and the gatherings of old folks in their seaside settlements.

"The roads here are horrible," Alf Doggett said. He had come down from London, Hither Green actually— Ivver Grain was what he said — and had expected Ventnor to be different. "It's a blooming disgrace."

Rose Doggett wondered whether they wouldn't have been better off in Cornwall. She had liked Newquay, on that one visit.

"You can't move here. It's all buses. They're fifty years behind the times," Alf said. "You don't think it's serious."

I had been smiling. I cultivated complainers.

I said, "No, no, I do think it's serious! Please go on."

"And there's the caravans," Rose said.

"Don't mention caravans," Alf said, and tapped his chest. "Me blood pressure."

We were on a bench, on one of the Ventnor ledges, facing down at the surfy beach. Because of its position in the steep notch, Ventnor seemed both smaller and cozier than sprawling Shanklin. But the Doggets, Alf and Rose, had become glum, talking about the traffic. And now they were talking about "the mainland," as if we were far at sea and not twenty minutes by ferry to Portsmouth.

The Thackwoods were on an adjacent bench, sharing a Mars bar, as they had done most afternoons since retiring to Ventnor from Bolton in Lancashire four years ago. I had seen Mr. Thackwood — Herbert — prick up his ears at Alf's "blooming disgrace." He knew we were talking about traffic. Anyway, it was the usual topic.

"It's the Council," Mr. Thackwood said.

Alf Doggett uncrossed his legs and smiled at Mr. Thackwood, who did not smile back. He was not being unfriendly; he was merely preparing to say "I've had it up to here," and he could not do that smiling.

"The Council's stupid," Mr. Thackwood said.

The Doggetts nodded. Alf said, "I couldn't agree more."

"I used to roon a big one — bigger than this blewdy Council, I can tell you," Mr. Thackwood said. "They don't know what they're doing."

"They're flipping useless," Alf said.

Mr. Thackwood said, "They don't give a booger."

Now Marion Thackwood spoke to Rose Doggett, confidentially, woman to woman. She said, "They don't give a ding."

They settled down to a long pleasant afternoon of complaining, and I was sure a friendship would emerge from it, and then there would be tea at the Doggetts' and Scrabble at the Thackwoods', Marion would encourage Rose to join the Women's Institute, and Alf and Herbert would take the coach into Ryde to watch football. At Christmas, there might be a glass of sherry for the Thackwoods when the Doggetts had them over to meet their son Ted and his wife and the two grandchildren, Keith and Amanda, and then they'd all look at Ventnor and say, "It's not half bad here, really. Bit of sunshine, no frost. And it's snowing in London!"

That was how I left them — making friends and tearing into the County Council. And I thought: This is better than castles.

I went via St. Catherine's — more English cottages, another Italian setting — and across the cliffs to Blackgang.

Blackgang was associated with smugglers — few places on the British coast did not claim to be the haunts of wreckers or moon-cussers. The thievery was boasted about and romanticized until it seemed a kind of heroism. It did not have any taint of criminality, and the whole of the south coast had pockets vying with one another over whose smugglers were the darkest or most daring. The Smugglers' Inn was one of the commonest names for a bar on the coast. Smuggling was fun, smuggling was blameless, smuggling was British.

There was a Fantasy Theme Park at Blackgang, with statues and murals and tableaux of smuggling; there were books about it and signs showing the way to smugglers' caves, and, of course, there were inns and public houses associated with this activity.

"Look, Ron," Penny Battley said. She was on a Blue Sky Tour from Yorkshire. "Smooglers."

The statues depicted cutthroats in black eyepatches, with tattoos on their arms, carrying casks of brandy.

Daniel Defoe was near here in 1724. He wrote, "I do not find they have any foreign commerce, except it be what we call smuggling, and roguing; which I may say, is the reigning commerce of all this part of the English coast, from the mouth of the Thames to the Land's End to Cornwall." A hundred years later, Richard Ayton, in A Journey Around Great Britain, wrote how he would fall into conversation with men on the coast and then, after talking about fishing, they "reverted with pride to those days when a little honest smuggling cheered a man's heart… with a drop of unadulterated gin. 'But these are cruel times,' they observed, 'and the Lord only knows what we shall be obliged to give up next.'"

Where there was smuggling, there was usually the plundering of wrecks, another piece of thievery that was regarded as having simple manly virtues and needing no more justification than the theory of finders-keepers. When wrecks were few, ships were lured onto rocks with false lights, and then the wreckers, village hearties, would swarm from the coast and pick them clean. Ayton met these men, too. He wrote, "Amongst themselves, a man who had robbed a vessel of property to the amount of fifty pounds might pass for a very honest fellow; but if he were known to have stolen a pocket handkerchief on shore, he would be shunned as a thief. They talk of a good wreck-season as they do a good mackerel season, and thank Providence for both."

I grew a little tired of being asked to enjoy the romance of smuggling. Like smugglers today, they were vicious cheats and bullies, who sneaked at night and squealed when they were caught. I could not see them as harmless, and at the very least they were grubby and mendacious. But they were praised for their recklessness and their courage. Meanwhile, back at the South Goodwin lightship and on the Sussex coast and throughout the tight bays and coves of south Cornwall, men were still smuggling for a living. Illegal immigrants, seasick Pakistanis, and puking Bangladeshis were being sneaked ashore near Deal, and cigarettes into Broadstairs, and bootleg brandy into Cornwall from Brittany, "but don't tell anyone I told you," my source, Arthur Tulley, said.

It was twenty miles from Ventnor to Freshwater Bay, but it was an empty path. The fields were open and very wide, and the long hills had views for miles, so that approaching I could see the high wind from the Channel giving the wheat the look of a riptide, and, when it lessened to a breeze, silken currents were stirred in the tassels.

I walked to Freshwater Bay and kept walking, across Tennyson Down (the poet once lived nearby and so had the photographer Julia Margaret Cameron) to Needle Down and West High Down, the westernmost point of the Isle of Wight. There, a series of chalk columns rose out of the sea and were known to sailors as the Needles. There were parts of those downs which were nearly five hundred feet high, and I could easily see the sun setting behind Swanage, seventeen miles away. Then I walked back to Freshwater Bay, and there I stayed the night.