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

We were of course speaking on the phone. If I had asked Mr. Smale that question in the Colliers' Arms on Whitehaven harbor one evening while he was smiling into his pint of beer ("Aye, it's brain damage, but it's loovely stoof—"), he would probably have said, "I'm supposed to say no, but I don't see the harm in it" — the English workingman enjoyed a conspiratorial posture—"Pop round in the morning and I'll sort you out" — and would wink—"I'll see you right."

I decided to leave Whitehaven. It was partly because four different people told me that George Washington's grandmother was buried in the local churchyard. It was a disappointing town — hundreds of small dark houses pitched across a bare hillside, and an air of doom about it. Coal-mining towns always seemed to wear an expression of fatigue, and they had a scattered volcanic look, the itch of coal dust, the atmosphere of eruption.

The rest of the coast, from the window of the train, was low and disfigured. There were small bleak towns like Parton and Harrington, and huge horrible ones like Workington, with its steelworks — another insolvent industry. And Maryport was just sad; it had once been an important coal and iron port, and great sailing ships had been built there in Victorian times. Now it was forgotten. Today there was so little shipbuilding on the British coast, it could be said not to exist at all. But that was not so odd as the fact that I saw very few vessels in these harbors and ports — a rusty freighter, a battered trawler, some plastic sailboats — there was not much more, where once there had been hundreds of seagoing vessels.

I watched for more. What I saw was ugly and interesting, but before I knew what was happening, the line cut inland, passing bramble hedges and crows in fields of silage and small huddled-together farm buildings and church steeples in distant villages. We had left the violated coast, and now the mild countryside reasserted itself. It was green farms all the way to Carlisle — pretty and extremely dull.

KESWICK PUNKS, a scrawl said in Carlisle, blending Coleridge and Wordsworth with Johnny Rotten. But that was not so surprising. It was always in the fine old provincial towns and county seats that one saw the wildest-looking youths, the pink-haired boys and the girls in leopard-skin tights, the nose jewels and tattooed earlobes. I had seen green hair and swastikas in little Llanelli. I no longer felt that place names like Taunton or Exeter or Bristol were evocative of anything but graffiti-covered walls, like those of noble Carlisle, crowned with a castle and with enough battlements and city walls to satisfy the most energetic vandal, VIOLENT REVOLUTION, it said, and THE EXPLOITED and ANARCHY! and SOCIAL SCUM. Perhaps they were pop groups? THE REJECTS, THE DEFECTS, THE OUTCASTS, THE DAMNED, and some bright new swastikas and THE BARMY ARMY. And on the ancient walls, SKINHEADS RULE!

Some of it was hyperbole, I supposed, but it was worth spending a day or so to examine it. It fascinated me as much as did the motorcycle gangs, who raced out of the oak forests and country lanes to terrorize villagers or simply to sit in a thatch-roofed pub, averting their sullen dirty faces. I did not take it personally when they refused to talk to me. They would not talk to anyone. They were English, they were country folk, they were shy. They were dangerous only by the dozen; individually they were rather sweet and seemed embarrassed to be walking down the High Street of dear old Halt-whistle in leather jackets inscribed Hell's Angels or The Damned.

The graffiti suggested that England — perhaps the whole of Britain — was changing into a poorer, more violent place. And it was easier to see this deterioration on the coast and in the provincial towns than in a large city. The messages were intended to be shocking, but England was practically unshockable, so the graffiti seemed merely a nuisance, an insult. And that was how I began to think of the whole country; if I had only one word to describe the expression of England's face I would have said: insulted.

THERE WAS a gloomy irritable air about the passengers on the boat train to Ulster. It was not only that they had been on board for five hours and had three more to go before the ferry. It was worse than tiredness. It was resentment — as if they were being exiled or forced back to school or jailed after a period of freedom. But in fact they were homeward bound.

I had joined the train at Carlisle. I expected to see either drunks or sleepers — it was midafternoon. But the passengers sat silently, holding their sallow faces in their hands, and they became gloomier as we progressed through the long Scottish hills of the border — Dumfries and Galloway. They were the sad-faced people in the wind at gray Stranraer.

By then the Scots had got off the train — the men who sat six to a table with a bottle of vodka and twenty cans of Tartan Ale; the families sitting in a nest of newspapers and sandwich wrappers and plastic bags; the poor stinking trampled terriers and their defiant owners; and the children screeching, "How much farva!" and "I can hear funda!" No trains got more befouled than the ones to Scotland, but this boat train was mostly empty by the time it reached Kilmarnock, and so on the last stage of its journey, along the Firth of Clyde, it looked wrecked and abandoned, the beer cans clanking and the bottles rolling on the floor, and an atmosphere of sour mayonnaise and stale cigarette smoke.

But I liked the hills and I was relieved once again to be near the shore. It was green countryside on a granite sea. Some of the coast was bare; in places there were forests, and hidden in deep lovely valleys there were baronial houses. The gray town of Girvan, with stone houses and squinting windows, had its back turned to the water and wind. At Glenwhilly there were crimson poppies beside the track.

It was here, just before arriving, that the returning Ulster people became very irritable.

"Go and sit dine! "

"I'm tulling ya fer the last time!"

"I says go and find your suster!"

"Don't look so surpraised!"

The Ulster accent is disliked in England, where it is regarded as a harsh, bastard, Lowland Scots with a Glaswegian glottal stop. It is a blustering accent, and just as Welsh people seem permanently conciliatory in the way they speak, so the gabbling Ulster folk seem forever on the boil, trying to swallow and be cruel at the same time. The accent seems full of strain and greed, and yet the people are relaxed and friendly. A linguistic quirk makes them seem angry; it is as odd and as fascinating as the national lisp in Spain. Each time I heard an Ulsterman open his mouth, I reached for my pen, like a missionary learning a tribal language and imagining a vernacular Bible or a dictionary.

Stranraer, in Loch Ryan, on the sea, was the main town on a peninsula shaped like a hammerhead. The ferry Galloway Princess was at the quayside, waiting for the arrival of the boat-train passengers to Larne. There were not many of us, but everyone was searched, including the children — and the officers groped even in the infants' clothes. I was frisked, and then my knapsack was sifted through. They found my sheaf of maps, my binoculars, my notebook, my switchblade knife.

"And what's your purpose in going to Northern Ireland?" the policeman asked. This was Constable Wallace. Crumbs, the things he'd seen!

"Just looking around," I said. "A little business, a little pleasure. I might do a spot of bird-watching."

"Carry on then," Officer Wallace said, and handing me my knife, he turned to his mate and said, "A spot of bird-watching."

There was a sign at the ferry entrance listing the various people who would not be allowed on board the Galloway Princess: rowdy people, drunks, and "football supporters… displaying their club 'favors' in any shape or form."