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

The Cumbrian Mountains rose up on the other side of Duddon Sands, the bare summit of Black Combe, and from Foxfield to Bootle the foothills of these mountains had forced the railway directly onto the coast. After Bootle the land became flatter; I was looking for a likely place to get off the train, and almost did at Ravenglass ("the junction of the Esk, the Mite, and the Irt"), but I was not quick enough.

To see Britain, I had had to think of ways of slowing myself down. It was a small kingdom, and even the great folds and rucks of its coast were not enough to make me feel as though I were traversing great tracts of land. I was always aware that I was only a matter of hours from London, though the differences in landscape and manners were so vast, it sometimes seemed a world away. But the coast of Britain was not always the past. Sometimes it had the face of the future. That was certainly the case on this line at Windscale — and Windscale was so much a part of the future that it was not yet on the Ordnance Survey Map.

But there was something there. It had the simplicity and proportions of an enormous tomb and was the more frightening for its absence of identifiable features. Something so new, so huge, so heavily fenced-in, on so distant a beach, had to be dangerous. On this old corrugated coast its size alone was disturbing, and its fresh red paint looked alarming against the gray landscape. Its cooling chimneys and its towers gave it the appearance of a Martian castle, but essentially this coastal monstrosity was no more than a tremendous box. There was nothing subtle about it. Its long flat planes made it grotesque. Even if you did not know what it was, it would still have been fearsome; it was not that it was unfamiliar, but rather that it looked dangerously explosive.

It was of course another nuclear power station — the nuclear pile at Windscale.

New track was being laid for a line going in and out of the plant. It would connect to this branch line. That was certainly another sign of the times. The only new railway track I saw being laid in Britain, this little spur to the nuclear power station, was for radioactive material, not passengers.

"They say they're not dangerous," a man next to me said. His name was Cutbill, but he pronounced it "Cootbill." "That's what they say — they're safe as houses."

"Do you think they're right?" I had no idea whom he meant by "they."

Mr. Cutbill said, "Know something? You can't insure them." And he grinned. "That's encouraging, isn't it? I mean to say, if they're so bloody safe, why can't you insure them?" Then he laughed: he knew the answer to that question.

It was low tide — great empty beaches of black rocks and black sand, and rock pools that looked greasy in the poor light. I had expected something different — greener, higher, fresher, perhaps Wordsworthian. That was the trouble with England — it was imaginary. "The West Cumbria Line" called up images of deserted woodland and steep fells and pikes, not a nuclear time bomb of incomparable ugliness on a black coast.

It was at that point that Cutbill told me about the coal mines. They had been running for hundreds of years. ("Whitehaven," Defoe wrote in 1725, "now the most eminent port in England for the shipping of coals.") One of the pits had been sunk in 1780, but it had closed in the 1940s, when an explosion killed a hundred and forty-seven men. Cutbill knew all the dates and all the casualty statistics. An explosion at Wellington Pit in 1910 had killed, he said, "a hundred and fifty men and boys." Haig Pit was still working.

"And the interesting thing," Cutbill said, "is that the mine shafts are under the sea — they go straight out, some of them for miles. But they're never flooded, and the water that leaks in is fresh, not salty."

A green headland loomed, and the train slowed down. This was St. Bees. I liked the look of it — villagey, with a handsome school on the right and cliffs on the left; I even liked its funny name. And this was a good time of day — the sun breaking beneath late-afternoon clouds for a long well-lighted evening.

"I think I'll get off here," I said.

"I've got things to do in Corkickle," Cutbill said. "I'm not like you blokes with your rooksacks," and he smiled. "I've got to fill the unforgiving minute."

Kipling, the great standby in the English oral tradition. The English often quoted with approval writers they hadn't read, just as they damned, as vulgar or dull, places they hadn't been.

I walked around St. Bees ("named from St. Bega, a 7th-century Irish maiden") and then, because Cutbill had aroused my curiosity with his talk of submarine coal mines, I walked on to Rottington and Whitehaven.

I could smell the coal and the potash before I saw the town. Whitehaven was old and moribund, and like many another bad place in England, its only hotel was dreary and expensive — the equivalent of $25 for a narrow room and a damp bathmat. Writing my diary that night, I generalized on this, concluding that every large hotel at which I had stayed in England was run-down or badly managed — overpriced, understaffed, and dirty, the staff overworked and slow; and all the smaller places were preferable, the smallest always the best. The English were great craftsmen but poor mass-producers of goods. They were brilliant at running a corner shop, but were failures when they tried their hand at supermarkets. Perhaps this had something to do with their sense of anonymity? Person to person, I had found them truthful and efficient and humane. But anonymity made them lazy, dishonest, and aggressive. Hidden in his car, the Englishman was often impatient to the point of being murderous; over the phone, he was unhelpful and frequently rude. They were not timid, but shy; shyness made them tolerant, but it also gave them a grudge against foreigners, whom they regarded as boomers and show-offs. It was hard to distinguish hotels in England from prisons or hospitals — most of them were run with the same indifference or cruelty, and were equally uncomfortable. The larger an English industry was, the more likely it was to go bankrupt, because the English were not naturally corporate people — they disliked working for others and they seemed to resent taking orders. On the whole, directors were treated absurdly well, and workers badly, and most industries were weakened by class suspicion and false economies and cynicism. But the same qualities that made English people seem stubborn and secretive made them, face to face, reliable and true to their word. I thought: The English do small things well and big things badly.

I called the Haig Pit the next day and asked whether I could go down the mine. I thought it would make a good story, another Orwell footnote, and an underground railway as well, "The Railway Under the Sea," sweating Cumbrians toiling at the coal face by the light of flaring lamps, here in the bowels of the earth, the sewer of the Lake District; all of it strange news — and you thought you knew something about England!

"Because it's more than my job's worth," Jack Smale was saying in a discouraging way. "If I let you go down there and something happens, I'll be in dead trouble. How do I know you're not going to throw a fit or something?"

"I promise not to throw a fit," I said.

"You can bloody promise anything you like, but if you've never been down a mine before, how do you know what's going to happen? You might come all over queer."

"I suppose I can't promise that I won't come all over queer," I said.

"I don't make the rules," Mr. Smale said. "It's just that our insurance people are always on at us."

"I only wanted to have a look," I said.

Mr. Smale said, "I don't want to be rude, mate. But—"

It was one of the rudest expressions in English; it was certainly the tetchiest.