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

So I came to see Mr. Bowles, and all those old south coast folk staring seaward, as sad captains fixing their attention upon the waves. The sea murmured back at them. The sea was a solace. It contained all life, of course, but it was also the way out of England — and it was the way to the grave, seaward, out there, offshore. The sea had the voice and embrace of a crowd, but for this peculiar nation it was not only a comfort, representing vigor and comfort. It was an end, too. Those people were looking in the direction of death.

Mr. Bowles was still slogging along beside me. I asked him if he had fought in the First World War.

"First and Second," he said. "Both times in France." He slowed down, remembering. He said, "The Great War was awful… it was terrible. But I wasn't wounded. I was in it for four years."

"But you must have had leave," I said.

"A fortnight," he said, "in the middle."

Mr. Bowles left me at Canford Cliffs, and I walked on to Sandbanks. The ferry was running — they called it "the floating bridge," and it resembled a barge shuttling on a pair of chains across the harbor mouth of Poole. I crossed and stepped onto an empty mile of sand dunes and scrub, called Studland Heath. It was an old windblown place. There were lovers on this heath, plainly copulating in the sandy craters. I walked on, past men standing up in waist-high heather. Some were naked and watchful. I took them to be perverts. Some stood on hillocks and just stared into the middle distance. The land was as flat as a floor. And it was littered with blowing paper — magazine pages, which I examined and found to be pornographic. In the remotest parts of this wild place there were girlie magazines and book pages, some of them torn into small pieces. I supposed that lonely men had taken them here, crept into the dunes by the sea, and examined them, feeling safe and hidden.

I was uneasy on this part of the coast path. It was not only the violence of the magazines. It was the wind, the dry grass, the desolation, the solitary standing men. It was one of a number of places on the coast where I expected to happen upon a dead body — decomposed, a torso, with missing limbs.

It was better, greener as I climbed higher and walked over Ballard Down to Swanage, a small bright town on a sweep of bay.

***

"The trouble with Swanage is that it's not on the way to anywhere," Sally Trubshaw said. Miss Trubshaw owned a public house. She had a Great Dane, which she fed prawn-flavored potato chips. She had only recently come to Swanage, but she said that few people ever passed through it. "That's why business is so bad."

Places in which business was bad were often especially pleasant. Swanage had an atmosphere of convalescence — fresh air and fishing boats and wind-scoured streets. It had grown a little over the years, but it had not been modernized. The train no longer ran from Wareham. It was the sort of small half-asleep seaside town that was perfect after a long walk.

That night, after I wrote my diary, I went into a pub and asked people: How far to Weymouth on the coastal path?

"It'll take you six days," Ted Witchell said. "It's all up and down."

"Two weeks," Lester Pride said, and wagged his head at me. "You like it up and down, do you?"

"I like it straight," I said.

This delighted Lester Pride.

"The path," I said.

"Listen to him!" Lester Pride said, and ordered me a drink.

He was wearing a sweatshirt that said LIFEGUARD in large letters and, under it, Beach Boys Club.

"It's the biggest faggots' club in California," he explained. He took a little bow. "You like it?"

I said it was very nice. An English person would wear a sweatshirt saying Penn State and regard it as the height of fashion that year. English style was full of backhanded compliments.

Lester Pride went to the window.

"There's a policeman outside. He's going to come in and arrest you for being drunk in charge of your leather jacket."

I was wearing my all-purpose leather jacket and my oily hiker's shoes.

"Where did you get that jacket! I hate it! My wife used to wear leather things all the time. I couldn't stand it! Which reminds me" — and now he addressed everyone at the bar—"celebration tomorrow, my decree nisi. Champagne for everyone!"

This was greeted with general approval, but Lester Pride just shrugged and stepped closer to me and said in a kind of mock-confidential way, "I run a pub not far from here, right? Listen, no one in two hundred years has ever lost money running it — except me! I'm going broke — I hate it. Why not come over and have a drink right — oh, God"—

I had downed my drink and was preparing to go back to my hotel.

"— you're going to walk to bloody Weymouth. You're just about to say you've got to get to bed early so you can bore everyone stiff with talk about rocks and interesting rock formations! Oh, Jesus, please forget it. Your leather jacket will get up and start without you — or those shoes, look at them, aren't they adorable — and you can catch up with them as they go hopping along the path. You Yanks are such—"

I left Swanage at nine the next morning, a lovely sunny day, and walked to Durlston Head. Below were the Tilly Whim Caves — more smuggler stories. I walked on, a little inland, so that I would not have to go up and down the bluffs. The gorse bushes had bright yellow flowers and the land was open — it was like traipsing around the edge of a great country, on top of its sliced-off side. I went across Dancing Ledge, and through Seacombe, and up Winspit, and various notches in the coast with steep terraces, and valleys of sheep browsing under ivy-strangled hawthorns. These terraces, the ridges of the edge of the valley, were caused by plowing six hundred years ago. At the village of Worth Matravers, I read that these furrows were called "strip lychetts," and the tourist sign said, "The need to plough such steep terraces was probably lessened after the dramatic population decline caused by the Black Death of 1348–9." Most of these Dorset villages were a great deal smaller than they had once been, and they had never recovered from the plague of the fourteenth century — nor had they forgotten it. The plague burying grounds were still clearly marked.

After lunch at the Square and Compass — the inn sign had something to do with the quarrying of local stone, a type of shelly limestone called Purbeck marble — I walked across a large headland called St. Alban's Head and hiked to a pretty bay, Chapman's Pool. On my way there I met Joan and Reg Flanchford. They were crossing a pasture.

"She's got a plastic hip," Reg Flanchford said.

They hurried behind me to the stile. I stepped aside and let the woman climb it.

"That's a plastic hip," Reg said.

Joan Flanchford tried to look dauntless.

"Put your best foot forward," Reg said.

Then Joan was on the other side, and I was making tracks for Houns-tout Cliff, which was almost vertical for a hundred and seventy-five feet, but full of birds. The coast cut in and led me up and down and took me past a waterfall splashing into the sea and it foamed on the gray shale foreshore that was scored in straight squares, like great flat paving stones.

The sun and wind made the long grass flicker like fire on the Kimmeridge Ledges. I walked these cliffs through the hot afternoon and did not meet another soul. There were pastures on the cliffs, and just to the left of the overgrown path two hundred vertical feet of gull-clawed air to the sliding surf, and the whole ocean beyond. This was the most beautiful stretch of coast I had seen so far, and I was alone on it. My happiness was greatly increased by the thought that I did not have the slightest idea where I was going. I always felt I was safe — everything would be fine — if I stayed on the coast.