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

I asked her where exactly.

She said, "In Long Island and Virginia. New York City. Bar Harbor, Maine."

"The best places."

"I was in service," she said. "The people were wealthy, you see."

Her employers had moved from house to house, according to the season, and she had moved with them. Perhaps she had been a cook. Her scones were wonderful — she had brought out a whole tray of scones and shortbread and sandwiches with the tea.

Why had she left America?

"I got very ill. For a while I couldn't work, and then I started getting doctors' bills. You know how expensive hospitals are in the United States. There's no National Health Service—"

And she had no insurance; and the family she worked for wouldn't pay; and she needed major surgery.

"— I could never have afforded it there," she said. "It would have taken all my savings. I came back home here and had my operation on the National Health. I'm feeling a wee bit better now."

So she had left the poverty trap in the Highlands and emigrated to the United States and become a servant and fallen into the American poverty trap. And now she was dying on the croft where she had been born. Most of the crofters here were old people whose children had moved away.

I continued to Caithness alone. The farther east I went, the greener it was, the more fertile the land. There were high mountains near the sea. The sheep were fat. They winced from the ditches where they crouched to get out of the wind. I went on to Coldbackie, Bettyhill, and Swordly. They were small cold places. I went to Brawl and Bighouse. The grass was better here. Caithness was a milder, more sheltered place, with sweet-smelling grass. But I liked it much less than Sutherland — its mountains streaming with pale scree, its black valleys of peat, its miles of moorland and bog, its narrow roads and surfy coast, and its caves. Tt was like a world apart, an unknown place in this the best-known country in the world. No sooner had I left it than I wanted to go back.

FROM THURSO I walked ten miles to Dunnet Head ("the most northerly point of mainland Britain"). On this sunny day its cliffs were a rich bronze-orange and the foam on the violent currents of the Pentland Firth was being whipped into peaks by the wind. The rest of the countryside was as flat and tame as the flagstones it had once produced. Only the place names were exciting — not just Buldoo and John O'Groats, but Hunspow and Ham, and Thrumster, Scrabster, Shebster, and Lybster. And who or what were the Hackle-makers of Buckies?

People had babies in Thurso and round about. That was unusual. It was a noticeable fact that in most places on the coast there were few small children being towed by parents — even on the sands. I saw big idle youths and middle-aged people and the very old. The very old, especially. They lived in the poorer, sorrier places. But Thurso had become prosperous from the offshore oil, and in the three or four towns on the British coast where there were jobs, there were also young families.

After a day and a night in Thurso I took the branch line down to Helmsdale, on the east coast. The summer brightness of the Scottish evenings made the flat brown moorland shimmer, and even the fissured bogs and sandpits did not seem so bad. We went along, stopping at ruined stations. THIS IS THE AGE OF THE TRAIN, the British Rail posters said, showing a man from a television show who was noted for his work on behalf of the handicapped people and incurables. He had been hired to promote British Rail. This branch line was certainly on its last legs. It was slow and dirty. But I liked it for being derelict and still stubbornly running across the moors. This was a little like being in Turkey.

The heather was in bloom at Helmsdale, and among the low twisted trees there were thorn bushes and yellow flowers on the gorse. Large boulders stood on the strand here, where the North Sea lapped the coast, filling the rock pools. The sea was overlooked by small isolated farms and hills coifed with thick ferns. Sheep nosed around old gun emplacements and crumbling pillboxes.

I had high tea — kippers, a poached egg, and scones with fresh cream — and took a later train south. It was sandy beaches to Brora and beyond. At Brora I saw a sheep-shearer. He was kneeling against a fat sheep and clipping her with hand shears, just beside the railway line. He did not look up. There were smears of sheep grease on his arms. He was clipping the creature gently, and the sheep was not struggling much. It was as if the shearer were giving his big child a haircut.

It was a long zigzag through Easter Ross to Inverness, where I was planning to head for Aberdeen. I walked through this slow branch-line train. In the guard's van there was a crate with a label saying. Pathological Specimens — Do Not Freeze, and in the next car a girl was writing a letter that began, "Dearest Budgie." There were campers returning from the Orkneys, and cyclists winding up their coastal tour. A Polish couple (the Zmudskys) were gnawing bread rolls — and their laps were spangled with crust crumbs. A man with unforgiving eyes, named Wockerfuss, and his middle-aged-looking child, a boy of ten, sat sharing a book titled Schottland.

Mr. Zmudsky smiled at a group of six men.

"Pgitty tgees," Mr. Zmudsky said, nodding at the trees out the window.

"Yews," one of the men said, and, realizing that Mr. Zmudsky was a foreigner, the man raised his voice, crying, "Yews!"

At this Mr. Wockerfuss stiffened, seeming to understand but refusing to look.

The group of men were railway buffs. They were always a sure sign that a branch line was doomed. The railway buffs were attracted to the clapped-out trains, like flies to the carcass of an old nag. They had stopwatches and timetables and maps. They sat by the windows, ticking off the stations as we went by. Ardgay (tick!). Tain (tick!), Invergordon (tick!), Alness (tick!), Muir of Ord (tick!), and then a bewildered little ticker named Neville twitched his big lips crossly and complained, "Hey, what happened to Dingwall?"

***

In a bed-and-breakfast place (Balfour Lodge) in Inverness I pondered the question as to whether Inverness could be regarded as on my coastal route. It was a matter of perspective. The map was not much help. Everything seemed to depend on how one described the Moray Firth. Was that part of the North Sea?

And then I was too bored to do anything but set off immediately for Aberdeen. Balfour Lodge was operated by a quarrelsome couple named Alec and June Catchpenny. It was a cold house. The bathmat was damp. The Catchpennys sulked. Their dog looked diseased, and I wanted to tell them it ought to be put down. I hated Alec's bowling trophies. Nor did either Catchpenny speak to me. "Six pounds" were the only words spoken to me in my twenty hours at Balfour Lodge. But what they bellowed at each other made me suspect that if I were to go fossicking in their bedroom drawers, I would find what the dirty shops called "marital aids."

I went, via Elgin and Insch, to Aberdeen on the 14:40. A new railway strike was threatened, and most of the passengers were talking angrily about the strikers.

"They won't have jobs to come back to," said one man. This was Ivor Perry-Pratt, who described himself as being in an oil-related industry. He supplied the offshore rigs with nonslip rubber treads for ladders and walkways. It seemed they wore out very quickly or else perished in the wet and cold conditions. Business was good, but Ivor Perry-Pratt always wondered. Will it last? He sympathized somewhat with the railwaymen.

His friend Eric Husker said, "They ought to sack the whole lot of them."

Husker was in earth-moving equipment. Aberdeen was the fastest-growing city in Britain.