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

The scars and eruptions — I supposed they were mines — showed clearly on the long low hills falling away from Roche. I heard someone referring to "barrows," but didn't know whether he meant the china-clay pyramids or the ancient burial mounds in the distance. The train passed under a number of small stone bridges. They were old and solid and symmetrical and looked both Chinese and ecclesiastical to me, but as I was thinking this a man behind me named R. L. Justice began explaining to his friend Maurice that this was Victorian railway architecture. It still looked Chinese and ecclesiastical.

Most of the people on this train — about sixty of them — were on what they called a "whist holiday," having traveled most of the day from Wolverhampton. I asked what a whist holiday was. It was three days of whist in a hotel at Newquay — just cards, in the lounge, while the Atlantic smashed against the coast. It was quite nice, really, they said. It made a change. They did it every year, taking advantage of the low-season prices. They were old and rather sweet and softly talkative.

Then there came a loud, deaf-lady's voice. It was one of the widows, Mrs. Buttress. "You see, they're Indian extracts!" she said. "Yes, extracts! From Africa! But they're very refined! And as far as their English is concerned, they could be dark-colored English people. They come from a very well-to-do family. And they're so polite! They are very kind to me, always bringing me things — the loveliest shawl! Sometimes it's food. Well, the food is interesting but you wouldn't want to make a whole meal of it, would you? I never comment on the food, but their fabrics are really quite fine. Now their child is car-mad! Their first names are impossible, but their surname is easy. It's Baden. An Indian name. But it's easy to remember, because it's like Baden-Powell!"

The train swung around the back of Newquay, which was so thickly piled against the coast, it had displaced the cliffs with three miles of hotels and boardinghouses.

***

About a half-hour after arriving in Newquay I was sitting in a parlor, a dog chewing my shoe, and having a cup of tea with Florence Puttock ("I said leave that shoe alone!"), who was telling me about the operation on her knee. It was my mention of walking that brought up the subject of feet, legs, knees, and her operation. And the television was on — there was a kind of disrespect these days in not turning it on for Falklands news. And Queenie, the other Peke, had a tummy upset. And Mrs. Puttock's cousin Bill hadn't rung all day — he usually rang just after lunch. And Donald Puttock, who lisped and was sixty-one — he had taken early retirement because of his back — Donald was watching the moving arrows on the Falklands map and listening to Florence talking about ligaments, and he said, "I spent me 'ole life in 'ornchurch."

Somehow, I was home.

But it was not my home. I had burrowed easily into this cozy privacy, and I could leave any time I wished. I had made the choice, for the alternatives in most seaside towns were a hotel, or a guest house, or a bed-and-breakfast place. This last alternative always tempted me, but I had to feel strong to do it right. A bed-and-breakfast place was a bungalow, usually on a suburban street some distance from the Front and the Promenade and the hotels. It was impossible to enter such a house and not feel you were interrupting a domestic routine — something about Florence's sewing and Donald's absurd slippers. The house always smelled of cooking and disinfectant, but most of all it smelled of in-laws.

It was like every other bungalow on the street, except for one thing. This one had a sign in the window, saying vacancies. I had the impression that this was the only expense in starting such an establishment. You went over to Maynards and bought a vacancies sign, and then it was simply a matter of airing out the spare bedroom. Soon, an odd man would show up — knapsack, leather jacket, oily hiker's shoes — and spend an evening listening to the householders' stories of the high cost of living, or the greatness of Bing Crosby, or a particularly painful operation. The English, the most obsessively secretive people in their day-to-day living, would admit you to the privacy of their homes, and sometimes even unburden themselves, for just £5. "I've got an awful lot on my plate at the moment," Mrs. Spackle would say. ("There's Bert's teeth, the Hoover's packed up, and my Enid thinks she's in a family way…" When it was late, and everyone else in bed, the woman you knew as Mrs. Garlick would pour you a schooner of cream sherry, say "Call me Ida," and begin to tell you about her amazing birthmark.

Bed and breakfast was always vaguely amateur, the woman of the house saying she did it because she liked to cook, and could use a little extra cash ("money for jam"), and she liked company, and their children were all grown up, and the house was rather empty and echoey. The whole enterprise of bed and breakfast was carried on by the woman, but done with a will, because she was actually getting paid for doing her normal household chores. No special arrangements were required. At its best it was like a perfect marriage; at its worst it was like a night with terrible in-laws. Usually I was treated with a mixture of shyness and suspicion; but that was traditional English hospitality — wary curiosity and frugal kindness.

The English required guests to be uncomplaining, and most of the lower-middle-class people who ran bed-and-breakfast places were intolerant of a guest's moaning, and they thought — with some justification — that they had in their lives suffered more than that guest. "During the war," they always began, and I knew I was about to lose the argument in the face of some evidence of terrible hardship. During the war, Donald Puttock was buzz-bombed by the Germans as he crouched under his small staircase in Hornchurch, and, as he often said, he was lucky to be alive.

I told him I was traveling around the coast.

"Just what we did!" Mr. Puttock said. He and Florence had driven from Kent to Cornwall in search of a good place to live. They had stopped in all the likely places. Newquay was the best. They would stay here until they died. If they moved at all (Florence wanted fewer bedrooms), it would be down the road.

"Course, the local people 'ere 'ate us," Mr. Puttock said, cheerfully.

"Donald got his nose bitten off the other day by a Cornishman," Mrs. Puttock said. "Still hasn't got over it."

"I don't give a monkey's," Mr. Puttock said.

Later, Mrs. Puttock said that she had always wanted to do bed and breakfast. She wasn't like some of them, she said, who made their guests leave the house after breakfast and stay away all day — some of these people you saw in the bus shelter, they weren't waiting for the number fifteen; they were bed-and-breakfast people, killing time. It was bed-and-breakfast etiquette to stay quietly out of the house all day, even if it was raining.

Mrs. Puttock gave me a card she had had printed. It listed the attractions of her house.

• TV Lounge

• Access to rooms at all times

• Interior-sprung mattresses

• Free parking space on premises

• Free shower available

• Separate tables

The lounge was the Puttocks' parlor, the parking space was their driveway, the shower, was a shower, and the tables tables. This described their house, which was identical with every other bungalow in Newquay.

I was grateful for the bed-and-breakfast places. At ten-thirty, after the Falklands news (and now every night there was "Falklands Special"), while we were all a bit dazed by the violence and the speculation and Mr. Puttock was saying "The Falklands look like bloody Bodmin Moor, but I suppose we have to do something," Mrs. Puttock would say to me, "Care for a hot drink?" When she was in the kitchen making Ovaltine, Mr. Puttock and I were talking baloney about the state of the world. I was grateful, because to me this was virgin territory — a whole house open to my prying eyes: books, pictures, postcard messages, souvenirs, and opinions. I especially relished looking at family photographs. "That's us at the Fancy Dress Ball in Romford just after the war… That's our cat, Monty… That's me in a bathing costume…" My intentions were honorable but my instincts were nosy, and I went sniffing from bungalow to bungalow to discover how those people lived.