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

But it was just swagger and sandwiches. "Bracing" was the northern euphemism for stinging cold, and it always justified the sadism in the English seaside taunt "Let's get Some color in those cheeks." It was another way of making a freezing wind compensate for the lack of sunshine. And yet not everyone in Blackpool was deceived. Beneath mountainous storm clouds, seventeen people on North Pier paid forty pence each to sit in the Sun Lounge — a sort of greenhouse on the pier with salt-spattered windows — and listen to Raymond Wallbank ("Your Musical Host") play "I'll Be Seeing You" on his console organ until the windows trembled. They sat and listened and read the Daily Mail — FIVE ARGIES DIE IN EXPLOSION — and when Raymond Wallbank took a breather, they chatted. Once again I noticed that the Falklands' news made the English nostalgic about rationing and the blitz.

Mr. Gummer wanted the Argentine mainland to be bombed — why not flatten Buenos Aires? After all, the Argies had captured a British sheep station. Those bloody bean-eaters had to be taught a lesson. Mr. Gummer liked to say that he had been a socialist his whole life, but he had a lot of respect for the Prime Minister. She had guts, and he agreed that it was a good idea to call the British troops "our boys."

He had come to Blackpool to fish. He was retiring this year and lived with his wife, Viv, in a cottage in Swillbrook, just off the motorway. He had paid a pound to stand on the pier with his fishing pole, and after a morning of it he was almost out of the live maggots he used as bait. Mr. Gummer wondered: Should I have a longer pole?

"Hae ye caught owt?" This was Ernie Fudge. The Fudges said they would be stopping a week in Blackpool. Ernie had known Harry Gummer for donkey's years. They were both in wholesale decorating equipment, supplying do-it-yourself shops in this part of Lancashire.

"Nay," Mr. Gummer said. "I want more tackle." He was thinking of the longer pole.

"Got tackle there in 'and!" Mr. Fudge cried. "Too bloody mooch tackle in fishing."

Harry Gummer said, "That's true of every 'obby tha takes oop. Me soon 'as a bloody bamboo pole can reach to bloody flagpole yonder."

Ernie shrugged. He did not want to argue. Fishermen always looked helpless to him, dangling hooks blindly in the sea. But Harry was his friend.

"Hae ye seen 'odges?" Ernie said.

"Aye," Harry said. "He waar at t'oother end. I boomped into 'im. He waar wi' scroofy booger — a big thick bloke." Harry showed with a gesture that the man had a big potbelly. "Union bloke, 'odges says, and I says 'Oh, aye,' and he gives me 'is union bloody card. And then I says—"

I took a tram to Fleetwood, but there was no footpath to Lancaster that way. I returned to Blackpool and realized that the tram system made this part of the coast bearable. I had enjoyed the ride, even if I had used it to list all the features of Blackpool I disliked. And when I asked local people to tell me Blackpool's virtues, I was confirmed in my dislike.

"But it's quaat naas soomtimes," Murine Mudditch said. "We've been living 'ere ever since Ian was made redoondant."

I asked her how she spent her time.

"Drinking and bingo," she said.

"Every day?"

"Most days."

"What if you don't like drinking and bingo?"

Mrs. Mudditch had a bubbling bronchitic laugh.

She said, "Then you've 'ad it!"

I wanted to leave Blackpool, and I was annoyed that it was not possible to walk away. I went to the bus station and bought a ticket to Morecambe. Five of us boarded the bus, and the bus went everywhere, stopping every quarter of a mile, at villages and at isolated public houses, where sad-faced women waited with string bags.

Mrs. Buglass was from Lancaster, but she hated the Lancashire type. She had lived too long in the south of England, she said — it had spoiled her.

"They're dead nosy up here," Mrs. Buglass said. "They want to know all your business — always talking, always asking questions. The people in the south are very polite. They don't go on and on, they don't ask you about your private affairs. That's the big problem up here — no privacy."

She smiled at me. We were on the top deck, front seat, Garstang up ahead.

"I like to keep meself to meself."

And she winked at me.

What was there about an English wink that made me so uncomfortable?

Mrs. Buglass said, "I'd give anything to go back to Southend!"

"I'm on my way to Southend," I said.

She winked again. "You're going in the wrong direction, darling."

No, I said, I would get there eventually: I was going clockwise.

***

Morecambe was wrapped around the edge of a dirty sea, scowling, its blackened terraces and hotels reminiscent of certain fierce churches — all spikes and shadows. Much of the foreshore was stony, but where there was sand, there were naked children kneeling and fat ladies holding their skirts against their thighs.

"Aye! This is good for you! Yer mightn't feel any benny fit for ages and ages. Boot—"

And there were ponies, too, and heaps of pony shit, and on the Front the joyless Pleasure Park and Fun City and Giftarama and a Gypsy fortuneteller named Annie Lee, who looked at my knapsack and announced in a voice full of dramatic clairvoyance that I was a traveler and that I had never been to Morecambe before — nor was I likely to come here again, she added, which was incontestable.

But I liked Morecambe for being sedate and dull and unapologetic. Its stateliness had been eroded by the blasts of wind, and it was the dampest place I had seen since Cornwall, but this lugubrious mood seemed to suit it. It astonished me that anyone would come here for a vacation and to have fun, since it seemed the sort of place that would fill even the cheeriest visitor — me, for example — with thoughts of woe. I imagined day-trippers getting off the train and taking one look and bursting into tears. But most people at Morecambe were enjoying themselves in the drizzle, and the fault was mine, not theirs. This was just another cultural barrier I was incapable of surmounting.

Nothing is more bewildering to a foreigner than a nation's pleasures, and I never felt more alien in Britain than when I was watching people enjoying their sort of seaside vacation.

On the branch-line train that traveled around Morecambe Bay in a wide swing to Barrow-in-Furness, I thought: This is the first part of the north coast that doesn't look blighted. Perhaps it was because we were leaving Lancashire and entering Cumbria, crossing from county to county in Silverdale, where there were daisies growing on the platform, and the ringing stench of cow manure — a smell that sang pleasantly like rotten ozone. It was hilly, green, misty, and the bay was so sandy, it was possible on a good day to walk the nine miles across to Grange-over-Sands. I remarked on the lovely bay, but a schoolgirl named Gina (straw boater, necktie, blazer) said that the water was so filthy, it was impossible to swim, and there was also quicksand out there that sucked you under.

There were more wide wet patches on Cartmel Sands, and small black islands just offshore. We came to Ulverston ("Here Stan Laurel the film comedian was born"). It was a day's walk to the Lake District, up the River Crake and through the Furness Fells to Grizedale Forest and the long lakes of Windermere and Coniston Water. But I had vowed to stick to the coast. I was not in search of natural wonders. And not far away there was A great branch line that went from Barrow to Carlisle, much of it along the coast: the West Cumbria Line.

***

This part of the English coast had everything. It had fishing villages and mountains and coal mines that went under the sea. It had footpaths and a good train and several industrial towns; it had a soft duney shore; and it had the scariest-looking nuclear reactor I had ever seen.