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

One night I watched Damien-Omen II with eight of them in the so-called T.V. Lounge — the back parlor, with extra chairs. I was astonished at the silliness of the movie, but I looked around the room and saw that the Welsh ladies were squinting seriously at it. It was so preposterous, I wanted to hoot. The Devil's son was somehow living with an American family — the fact that they were obscenely rich and living like lords in Chicago was supposed to make it believable. The Devil's son had flinty eyes and went to a military academy, where periodically he reverted to his devilish self, calling down Satan's wrath on the school bullies. There was often a shiny crow overhead, croaking and doing damage — wreaking havoc was how one was supposed to view it. Nothing in this plot made me regret that I had missed Omen I, but because I had missed it, I had to ask questions of the Welsh ladies. I always got prompt replies.

"Who is that man?"

"One of the Devil's Disciples," Miss Ellis said, with a slewed Welsh emphasis on the last syllable.

Some of the ladies were knitting. One read a newspaper during the commercial breaks. They chatted about Wimbleball and Dunster. But they were silent during the movie. Only I spoke up — because I was confused.

"What's that statue?"

"Oh, that will be the Whore of Babylon, I expect," Miss Thomas said in her sweet Welsh voice.

The little brat had 666 inscribed on his scalp.

"That's the Number of the Beast," Miss Ellis said.

But I hadn't asked.

"Revelations," Miss Parry-Williams said.

Toward midnight, after most of the characters had been murdered by the Devil's son, the film ended. The parlor was now filled with the syrupy smell of the Welsh ladies' cologne. They stifled yawns and stood up.

Miss Thomas said, "I shouldn't be a bit surprised if we saw Omen Three before very long! Good night, Gwyneth; good night, Alice: good night—"

***

The schoolteachers made me impatient to see Wales. They looked English, but their demeanor was amused and remote. They whispered at breakfast, they were very polite, even circumspect; they behaved as though in a foreign land.

There was no path on this stretch of coast to Bristol. I put my maps aside and took the West Somerset Railway. It was Britain's longest private line — twenty-five miles, operating between Minehead and Taunton. The British Rail service had ended in 1971. The West Somerset line was both a passion and a business for the people who ran it; some were volunteers. The station at Minehead had been preserved as a sort of usable antique, full of nostalgic signs advertising cigarettes and motor oil. That aspect — the backward-looking part of it — rather irritated me. The trouble with railway buffs was that they were not really interested in going anywhere. They were playing — taking photographs, posing on locomotives, collecting engine numbers. They relished the dusty aesthetics of railway lore.

They especially liked dressing up. That seemed to be part of the English character — entering into fantasy, putting on different clothes, and setting the old dull personality aside. It was what made amateur dramatics in England so energetic; drag acts here were so humorous that they did not need the justification of being wholesome. And so much of English life required costumes — clothes represented freedom or power or a new self. The members of the House of Lords wore ermine, and Oxbridge students wore robes, and even milkmen wore distinctive leather jerkins; and there was no more serious boast than a bowler hat. It was the railway buff who crossed the thin line between dressing up and travesty — the English seldom bothered to make much of a distinction between the two in any case. The reward for restarting a railway line was the chance to dress up as a Stationmaster or a Conductor or a Guard or even a Sweeper — with a uniform and special buttons and a distinct kind of hat.

The train was full of joy-riders pretending to be passengers; there and back, that was always the railway buff's itinerary. They liked the atmosphere. They took pictures of each other and of the woodwork and steam. We went along the shore to Dunster and its dark brown castle ("The Dutch embossed leather hangings are outstanding"), then on to Watchet, turning inland for Williton. Still the railway buffs snapped pictures and marveled at the old signs—"Woodbines" and "Pratt's Motor Spirit" and "Craven 'A'—Will Not Affect Your Throat." I gathered that these signs excited memories of the old days, when there were hundreds of trains like this rattling through the English hills. At just the point where the railway buff's excitement was at its most feverish ("Crikey, Rafe, don't it take you back?"), and they began unpacking sandwiches from their hampers and setting up their thermos flasks of hot tea, the train stopped at Bishops Lydeard and everyone was ordered out. We were put onto a bus and taken in silence to Taunton. So the West Somerset Railway was something like Butlin's Holiday Camp — lots of razzmatazz but not much substance. Somehow it was not the answer to the transport need in that part of Somerset.

***

On the 14:21 to Weston-super-Mare a man named Wilf pinched a piece of cigarette paper into a little gutter and then dropped strings of tobacco into it. He licked it and rolled it and twisted one end — it looked like a firecracker — and then turned to me and said, "Any idea what time we get to Bristol?"

I said I didn't know. "I'm going to Weston-super-Mare."

He set his cigarette on fire and then took it out of his mouth and said sheesh, expelling the smoke. "Better you than me."

And then, perhaps because he knew I was going to Weston-super-Mare, Wilf avoided me and showed no interest in conversation. Or perhaps my knapsack had put him off? And yet I found that wearing a knapsack was a kind of advertisement of willingness, and more than anything it stirred the English passion for giving directions. Giving directions here was a form of conversation. But Wilf just smoked and sulked, and when I got off the train he shook his head, as if indicating that I was making a big mistake.

Under a dark collapsing sky, Weston-super-Mare looked bleak and residential and rather funless. Like Bexhill and Worthing and some other places on the south coast, it was a large town with the soul of a suburb. And it was in such places that I regretted the endless roads of flat housefronts and pined for a little vulgarity or something vicious. In Weston-super-Mare I was directed to the Waxworks.

On the way there, down the Promenade, I saw that the wind had whipped the water into troughs. Even in this poor light there was a wonderful view — of Wales, of the two black islands, Flat Holm and Steep Holm, and at the end of the beach a curved loaf-shaped landspit called Brean Down. The beach was long and mostly empty and very gray, and it was flatter than the water. Parked on the sand, as in a cartoon of desert mirages, were a red Punch and Judy booth and two yellow huts, one labeled TEA-STALL and the OTHER SHELLFISH BAR. A flapping pennant said DONKEY RIDES—20 PENCE. The few people on the beach lay heavily bundled-up on the sand, like war wounded on a beachhead. Their faces were tight with discomfort. A fat old lady with wild hair, wearing a winter coat but barefoot, stood and howled, " Arthur! " The donkeys stamped and shuddered in a little group, looking thoroughly baffled. And here on the Promenade hunched-over ladies with big handbags tipped their stoutness into the wind and breathed loudly through their teeth. Across the street at the Winter Gardens people were buying tickets for tonight's show, Cavalcade of Song. Beyond the donkeys, beyond the fat barefoot lady and the Punch and Judy booth, a new island surfaced and sprouted trees. Then I saw it was a ship going by.