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

After the villages of Devon, Plymouth looked vast. It was scattered over several valleys, and farther in, it was on the hills as well. It was only the larger towns and cities of England that covered hills like this. The Plymouth outskirts looked ugly and dull.

"Busy, built-up place," Mr. Gussage said. "I remember my mother and father came to my wedding. They were country people, and this was Brighton. They said, 'Look at all them slate roofs!'"

Mr. Gifford was staring at Plymouth. He said, "Yes. Look at all them slate roofs."

A SPECIAL TRAIN TICKET I bought in Plymouth called the Cornish Explorer allowed me to go anywhere in Cornwall, on any train. I traveled into the low shaggy hills, which were full of tumbling walls and rough stone houses and yellow explosions of gorse bushes. I had lunch for £8 ($14), which was twice as much as my ticket. The dining car was set for eighteen people, but I was the only diner. Elsewhere on the train, the English sat eating their sandwiches out of bags, munching apples, and salting hard-boiled eggs. Times were hard. I realized that my lunch was overpriced, yet in a very short time there would be no more four-course lunches on these trains, no more rattling silverware, and no waiter ladling soup. But it was also ridiculous for me to be the only person eating: soup, salad, roast chicken and bread sauce, apple crumble, cheese and biscuits, coffee. There were two waiters in the dining car, and a cook and his assistant in the kitchen. The meal that most long-distance railway passengers had once taken for granted had now become a luxury, and Major Uprichard would soon be telling his grandchildren, "I can remember when there were waiters on trains — yes, waiters! "

There were rolling hills until Redruth, and then the land was bleak and bumpy. There was only one working tin mine left in Cornwall (near St. Just), but the landscape was scattered with abandoned mineworks, which looked like ruined churches in ghost villages. Cornwall was peculiarly uneven, with trees growing sideways out of stony ground, and many solitary cottages. On a wet day, its granite was lighted by a granite-colored sky, and the red roads gleamed in a lurid way; it looked to be the most haunted place in England, and then its reputation for goblins seemed justified. It was also one of those English places which constantly reminded the alien, with visual shocks like vast battered cliffs and china-clay waste dumps and the evidence of desertion and ruin, that he was far from home. It looked in many places as if the wind had screamed it of all its trees.

"I love the red earth," Mrs. Mumby said, staring out the train window at the drizzle and reminiscing. "During the war I lived at Ross-on-Wye, in an antiquated old cottage. These Cornish cottages remind me of that. I don't like the architecture of today. Concrete jungle, I call it."

Appearing to reply to this, Vivian Greenup said sharply, "I've looked everywhere for my husband's walking stick. My daughter brought it to the hospital in case he might need it. After he died, I looked everywhere and couldn't find it."

Mrs. Mumby stared at Mrs. Greenup, and her expression seemed to say: Why is Vivian running on like this about her dead husband's walking stick?

"It's quite a weapon," Mrs. Greenup said. "You could use it as a weapon."

We came to Penzance ("somewhat ambitiously styled the 'Cornish Riviera'…John Davison, the Scottish poet, drowned himself here"). I changed trains and went back up the line about seven miles to St. Erth, and there I waited in the rain for the next train to St. Ives.

There were few pleasures in England that could beat the small three-coach branch-line train, like this one from St. Erth to St. Ives. And there was never any question that I was on a branch-line train, for it was only on these trains that the windows were brushed by the branches of the trees that grew close to the tracks. Branch-line trains usually went through the woods. It was possible to tell from the sounds at the windows — the branches pushed the glass like mops and brooms — what kind of a train it was. You knew a branch line with your eyes shut.

We went along the River Hayle and paused at the station called Leland Saltings, which faced green-speckled mudflats. Hayle was across the water, with a mist lying over it. There were two more stops — it was a short line — and then the semicircle of St. Ives. It was Cornish, unadorned, a gray, huddled, storm-lit town on several hills and a headland, with a beach in its sheltered harbor. Today, in the rain, it was quiet, except for the five species of gulls that were as numerous now as when W. H. Hudson was here and wrote about them.

All the great coastal towns of England were a mixture of the sublime and the ridiculous. Here was the sublime climate and the pearly light favored by watercolorists, the sublime bay of St. Ives and the sublime lighthouse that inspired Virginia Woolf to write one of her greatest novels, and the sublime charm of the twisty streets and stone cottages. And there was the ridiculous: the postcards with kittens in the foreground of harbor scenes, the candy shops with authentic local fudge, the bumper stickers, the sweatshirts with slogans printed on them, the souvenir pens and bookmarks and dishtowels, and the shops full of bogus handicrafts, carved crosses and pendants. These carvings at St. Ives advertised "Our Celtic Heritage — The Celts were famous for their courage and fighting qualities, which carried them before the birth of Christ from their homeland north of the Alps, across the known world…" Cornish pride was extraordinary, and it was more than pride. It had fueled a nationalist movement, and though the last Cornish-speaking person died in 1777 (it was Dolly Pentreath of Mousehole), and Cornish culture today was little more than ghost stories and meat pies, there was a fairly vigorous campaign being fought for Cornwall to secede from England altogether. It was not for a vague alien like myself to say this was ridiculous, but it did seem to me very strange.

Across St. Ives Bay were sandy cliffs and dunes, and I thought of walking along that shore to the village of Portreath: it was about twelve miles; I could do it before nightfall. But the rain was coming darkly down like a shower of smut, and I still had my Cornish Explorer ticket. So I walked to St. Ives Head, where the Atlantic was riotous; then I returned to the station to wait for the little train to take me back to St. Erth.

The graffiti at St. Ives Station said, Wogs ought to be hit about the head with the utmost severity, and under this, Niggers run amok in London — St. Ives next! and in a different hand, Racism is a social disease — you should see a doctor.

I went back to St. Erth and changed for the main-line train to Liskeard, going back the way I had come, past the mining chimneys and the clay deposits and the great hard sweeps of stony land and the green glades that each contained a large house — one comfortable family — but no more.

The branch-line train to Looe was waiting at Liskeard. It ran on a single track through a narrow ravine under the main-line viaduct and made a big loop through the countryside, past ivy-covered walls and steep hills to Coombe Junction, where a man in a rubber raincoat yanked levers to change the points, nudging the train down the branch line to Looe and the coast. There were about twenty-five people on the three coaches of this train, and the train went so slowly, it did not even startle the horses cropping grass by the side of the track.

The woods on this rainy day were deep green. The branches bumped and brushed the windows. The nearness of the trees and the slowness of the trains were the best things about the branch lines.

We came to St. Keyne. There was a famous well here. "The reported virtue of the water is this, that, whether husband or wife come first to drink thereof, they get the mastery thereby." There is a ballad by Southey in which a man describes how, just after his wedding, he went to the "gifted Well" and had a drink, so that he would be "Master for life," but his wife was quicker-witted.