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

"I work about ten hours a day," Daphne Wrennell said at the Albion Hotel, "and I get an hour off in the morning and about three hours in the afternoon. Wednesdays are free. I'm from Wales — me mum's Welsh — we're all from somewhere different here at the Albion. I've been coming back here every year for the past four years to work. It's quite nice, really. I know it's not a real job, but you get two months off a year when the hotel's closed — no, we don't get paid for that. That's in the winter. I have a bit of rest then. I was thinking of doing some traveling next winter. I might go to Turkey. I always fancied Turkey. I got some brochures — it's not very expensive, is it? I was thinking of going alone. Think I should?"

I urged her to take a friend and gave her the usual cautions.

The sun was shining the next morning, so I decided to walk the back roads to Yarmouth. It seemed to me that there was little traffic on the island, but that the roads were so crooked and narrow the few cars were often held up, and the buses were so large they went slowly, causing obstructions. I was told that it was possible to whip around the island in an hour and a half, but that the buses prevented this.

"In my youth, we used to call those 'sharabangs,'" a man told me. We had stopped to watch a bus that had become jammed against a curve in order to let a horse and buggy go past. Querying faces with white noses and eyeglasses appeared at the windows of the bus.

"Sharabangs," the man repeated. This was Francis Pitchford, an accountant from Surrey. He had a cottage here and would be retiring to it soon. As I listened to him on the road that morning, it struck me that many people who appeared to be reminiscing were actually gloating or boasting, or even lying.

"I can remember," Mr. Pitchford said, "the two-tier buses, very big ones, drawn by horses. Now that shows you how old I am."

But he was not very old, certainly not much over sixty — and that was nothing to boast about. I did not believe him, but I kept my mouth shut, and I let him say, "Oh, this was way before your time, young fellow."

There was a kind of hostility in this, something like I've been here longer than you, a very English way of putting down a stranger, telling you that he was older than you were. I had heard Englishmen pretend to be older than they were in order to score a point. It was only the old in England who were allowed to be opinionated.

He was still grinning at the stranded bus when I walked on.

I saw a card in the window of a general store farther up the road. It said,

Catholics — Remember These Words?

IN NOMINE PATRIS ET FILII ET SPIRITU SANCTU…

followed by holy mass, which until a few years ago could be heard in every Catholic church in the land.

The same holy mass is still celebrated privately in Newport on the 3rd Sunday of the month.

Telephone: Newport 4220

It made the Latin mass seem like a secret ceremony, and indeed the tone of the note hinted at a clandestine service, calling up images of early Christians and whispered consecrations. I wondered if on the Isle of Wight there was not an old-style unreformed Catholicism taking hold, and I longed to know more. I found a public phonebox and dialed the number, but I got no reply. It was perhaps an example of my aimlessness that I would gladly have changed my plans and walked to Newport to find out about the secret Catholics if I had been able to raise anyone with the phone call.

The path through the woods to Yarmouth was straight and level; once it had been a railway line, and now it was a cinder track, used mostly by hackers. A large bird alighted on the path. I took out my binoculars and saw it was an English jay, Garrulus glandarius, large, beautifully colored, noisy, and very shy. It flew up suddenly, as if propelled by its harsh squawk. It had been startled by a young woman coming down the path toward me.

I knew she would be frightened of me. Two women had been murdered ("savagely") in some woods near Aldershot the day before. It had been reported by the papers and on the television news. These days everyone watched the news, because of the Falklands War, so there was an unusual consciousness of public events. It was not explained what "savagely" meant, but anyone could guess: a razor or a knife, probably; and the woman-hating slasher was almost certainly a solitary man with a plausible face, wearing old clothes, his weapon in his knapsack, and oily hiker's shoes on his feet — very likely a man like me, on a path like this.

She saw me and froze. I wanted to go another way, but there was a marsh beside the path, so I had to stick to this route and walk right past her. I tried to be jaunty, but that brought a look of terror to her face. She looked away, but there was an intensity in her alert movements that was like panic — she was not breathing; she was listening. She was about twenty-two and her fear had made her features very plain. I wanted to say: It's not me!

I said, "Good morning," as I passed her.

She mumbled something in a frightened voice. I felt sorry for her, and did her the favor of hurrying away. I looked back: she was running down the path toward Freshwater.

Yarmouth was a fine place, very small and solid, made of large stones the damp had turned green on the low pretty buildings, with proud streets and a little compact ruin of a castle ("The Arbella sailed from Yarmouth for Massachusetts in 1630"). It was a very private town on a cozy harbor and it had a long slender pier. It was an ancient place, almost as old as the island itself; it faced north. The ferry was just about to leave, so I jumped aboard.

It was here, on the Solent, that Tennyson wrote "Crossing the Bar," but in the morning it was hard to imagine "Sunset and evening star, / And one clear call for me!" and the poet recommending his soul to Heaven. The sun was sparkling on the water behind the yachts tipping toward Yarmouth — a Force Eight was blowing, and I could see the collapsed Hurst Castle to the west, jutting on a spit of land from Hampshire, its arches like a set of broken dentures. There was a lovely lighthouse beside it, a white pawn on the water.

In this way I left the Isle of Wight and sailed on the ferry to Lymington, with its clusters of masts and the grass growing around the harbor. It reminded me of a Cape Cod town, a village on the sea, like Barnstable or Sandwich. It had a little round harbor, and the train went right down to the pier, where the ferry docked.

Traveling to Brockenhurst from Lymington — only five of us boarded this little train: its days were numbered, surely — I thought how easy it was for me to travel around Britain. When the path ran out there were trains or buses, and they left on time. This reflection was prompted by the arrival of the train immediately after the ferry docked in this fairly insignificant place. Money was easy — I could use personal checks or get money at any bank, even in a village such as Lymington. People were generally efficient and helpful, and some were friendly; everyone spoke English; I was never in danger; it was impossible for me to get lost. Was it any wonder that England was the most widely explored country on earth? In a sense, nothing was unknown in England — it was just variously interpreted.

But I knew that I needed this ease — the language, the money, the safety — because it was the subtlest culture on earth to explain. The English found foreigners funny because foreigners weren't English, and because it was impossible for anyone to become English. To an American, this attitude was itself funny and puzzling. But even after eleven years of groping for explanations, I was still groping, and on the coast I was in unfamiliar places. What a relief that everything worked so well and I was never afraid!