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

Narberth was a small white iron-girt station in a green glade of whirling gnats, a beautiful place for the train to stop in the late-afternoon sun, and I felt a bit sad when we pulled out; and then sunset at Saundersfoot — I kept saying that phrase to myself — and Tenby, a town on a high cliff with more cliffs around it and boulder islands in its bay. It looked perfect. It was the loveliest town I had seen so far. I found a boardinghouse with a view of the harbor and made no plans to leave.

***

The elegant houses of Tenby standing tall on the cliff reminded me of beautifully bound books on a high shelf — their bow windows had the curvature of book spines. The town was elevated on a promontory, so the sea on three sides gave its light a penetrating purity that reached the market square and fortified the air with the tang of ocean-washed rocks. It was odd that a place so pretty should also be so restful, and yet that was the case. But Tenby was more than pretty. It was so picturesque, it looked like a watercolor of itself.

It had not been preserved by the fastidious tyrants who so often took over British villages — the new class who moved in and gutted the houses, and then, after restoring the thatched roofs and mullioned windows, hid a chromium kitchen in the inglenook, which ran on microchips. Such people could make a place so picturesque that it was uninhabitable. Tenby had been maintained, and it had mellowed; it was still sturdy, and I was glad I had found it. But it was the sort of place that denied a sense of triumph to the person who secretly felt he had discovered it — because its gracefulness was well known; it had been painted and praised; it was old even in Tudor times; and it had produced Augustus John (who wrote about Tenby in his autobiography, Chiaroscuro) , as well as the inventor of the equal sign (=) in mathematics, Robert Recorde. But, then, there were no secret places in Britain that I had seen; there were only forgotten places, and places that were being buried or changed by our harsh century.

Tenby had been spared, and it was the more pleasing for being rather quiet and empty. I walked around dreamily. For the first time since I had set out on this trip I felt that a watering place was fulfilling its purpose — calming me, soothing me, making me want to snore over a book on a veranda with a sea view.

"This place is a madhouse in the summer," a publican named Nuttgens told me. "It's chock-a-block. Pavements full of tourists, roads full of cars. You can't move! And there's usually a tail-back all the way to Saundersfoot—"

It was hard to tell whether he was boasting or complaining, but in any case I did not want to imagine Tenby being trampled. I liked to think of it always like this, quietly lived in, with bookshelf terraces of houses and twisty streets and that marvelous gauzy light.

Nuttgens said, "Every business here is owned by an Englishman." He himself was from Birmingham. "And all the employees are Welsh."

I asked him why this was so.

He tapped the side of his nose with his finger, suggesting that the English were cleverer.

Other English people in Tenby also told me this, but it was not so. My landlady was Welsh, the pub across the street was owned by a Welshman, and there were Welsh names everywhere on shop signs. And yet it was true that part of Tenby's appeal was that its English elegance had been softened by Welsh charm, and it had the faintly asymmetrical look one often sees in the most dignified former colonies.

***

There was a coastal path that went from Tenby to St. Dogmaels. a hundred and seventy miles, around the shore of Pembrokeshire. I walked the few miles to Old Castle Head — the rocks at the shore had the look of lions' paws — and because I hated retracing my steps, I walked on to the nearest railway station and took the branch line to Pembroke Dock. This station was Manorbier Newton. We passed Hodgeston ("The church chancel contains a double piscina and mutilated triple sedilia"), and then strange events overtook the train. Or perhaps not strange but merely old-fashioned.

The train came to a sign at a road, saying, STOP: Open Crossing Gates Before Proceeding, and it stopped. The uniformed man who was both guard and ticket collector got out and swung the gates open wide enough so that they blocked the little motor road and unblocked the railway tracks. Then the train shuddered and the birds sang and the train moved across the road. The guard closed the gates, latched them, boarded the train, and we resumed our journey through meadows and farms and low woods.

There was another sign: STOP: Whistle Before Proceeding. The train obeyed — its whistle was a two-note trumpet blast — and we crossed the road. It was a hot afternoon, and the country roads smelled of warm tar and looked like dusty licorice; and we stopped at short platforms, halts in the middle of farms, and at Lamphey in a pasture, the cow parsley lazily brushing the sides of the train.

When most of the rural branch lines were closed in 1964, this line was spared, and it continued to be spared because it carried people to the ferry that traveled from Pembroke to Cork, in the Republic of Ireland, or "Error," as some Welshmen called it.

We pulled quietly into Pembroke. There were only seven of us on the train; it was not a ferry day. Pembroke seemed a very ordinary town, but it had a grand castle. Across the harbor was Milford Haven ("described by Lord Nelson as the best natural harbor in the world"), which was densely and blackly industrial, with its tanks and refineries and its oil-cracking plant. Why were the most prosperous places the ugliest?

I asked Mr. Peevey the stationmaster the way to Haverfordwest. It seemed there was no train that day, but there was a bus. As he explained where the bus stop was, his voice grew faint, and then he said, "Listen. What's that?"

He squinted across the railway platform and turned his head, inclining his ears and spreading out his fingers, listening in a tense sort of way.

"Yes," Mr. Peevey said after a moment. "Look."

I did not see anything. I had not heard anything. Mr. Peevey was smiling, and he looked at his watch — a stationmaster's instinctive reflex, I supposed. He nodded at the air.

Then I saw the specks, thousands of them, just above the ground, like a veil descending through the air. It made me slightly dizzy, their motion, their numbers — it was like seeing spots.

"Bugs," I said.

"Bees," Mr. Peevey said. "They're swarming."

They were darkly gathering, a large fuzzy gust of them approaching the platform.

Mr. Peevey was not worried. "My grandfather kept bees," he said calmly. "He could stir them around and get the honey and what-not. He never got stung. You get immune to bee stings. Most bee-keepers are immune."

"I suppose they could be dangerous?" I indicated the swarm.

"Kill you," Mr. Peevey said. "That's how dangerous."

He smiled again, marveling — as people do — at murderous Nature.

"If you start flaking around, look you, that lot will bite you." He giggled a little, in amazement rather than malice. "You could be stung to death!"

They were great Bible readers, these Welsh people, and I was sure he was thinking of the text O death, where is thy sting?

"I'd take the long way to the bus stop if I were you," Mr. Peevey said.

On the bus to Haverfordwest — the bus went slowly, and always down country lanes — I decided what it was that bothered me about the Welsh villages and towns. There was only one kind of cottage in the villages, and it was not a particularly pretty style; there was only one kind of terrace in the towns, and it was mournfully flat. They were one note, one color, one class, and in some places every house was identical, and equally ugly. This in itself was not remarkable — such towns had counterparts in the United States — but these Welsh ones were entirely surrounded by woods and hills and fields, and so they looked sullen, with faces averted from the green hills.