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

In the lobby they were selling souvenirs of the Royal Visit. How had they had time to prepare these paperweights and medallions and letter openers and postcards saying Craw's Nest Hotel — Souvenir of the Royal Visit?

"We knew about it in January, but we had to keep it a secret until May," Eira said. "We kept praying that nothing would go wrong. We thought the Falklands might finish it."

So they had been putting the place in order and running up souvenirs for almost seven months. The royal lunch had lasted an hour.

That night they held a celebration party in the hotel parking lot. It was a way of giving thanks. The hotel invited the whole town, or rather two — Easter Anstruther and Wester Anstruther. They had a rock band and eight pipers and some drummers. The racket was tremendous and continued until two o'clock in the morning, hundreds of people drinking and dancing. They sold sausages and fish and chips, and there were bales of hay for people to sit on. The band was bad, but no one seemed to mind. There were old people, families, drunks, and dogs. Small boys smoked cigarettes in a delighted way and sneaked beer from the hotel. Girls danced with each other, because the village boys, too embarrassed to be seen dancing, congregated in small groups and pretended to be tough. There was a good feeling in the air, hilarity and joy, something festive, but also grateful and exhausted. It wasn't faked; it was like the atmosphere of an African village enjoying itself.

At eleven I took a walk down to the beach. I passed a man in rubber waders standing alone and looking puzzled on the road. A girl and her grandmother were eating ice cream cones in the half-dark. I passed a cottage; inside, a family of five was singing out loud. I saw more children smoking behind a wall. In another house a man and woman seemed to be proposing a toast. There was moonlight on the water, and this moonglow had settled on the waves and made them stand out like the ribs of a washboard. I walked toward this light, and on the stony beach, just below the seawall where I was standing, a boy was clumsily fucking a girl, his buttocks plum-blue under the bright moon and her upraised legs almost luminous and seeming to steady him. It was chilly, he was having a little trouble, but he was so eager, he did not see me. They made me feel invisible, but I left them there and I thought of the band and the dancing and beer and the hay bales and the moonlight and the smell of seaweed and the young couple fucking where the Queen had just been — it was like a mural, an allegorical painting, but a funny one, a Gully Jimson or a Stanley Spencer.

The cleaning ladies were buzzing early the next morning.

"I couldn't believe it," Mrs. Ross said. "It didn't seem real. It was like a dream."

I said, "What will Willie Hamilton think?"

Willie Hamilton was their Member of Parliament and noted for being in favor of abolishing the monarchy.

"Willie Hamilton can get stuffed."

After breakfast, I set off for Leven. It was a gray morning, and rather chilly. After I had walked a few miles, it began to rain. I kept walking and heard a throstle, as it was called here. Then the rain was too much for me. I hurried to a village and waited for the bus to Leven. The villages on the coast of Fife had a quiet beauty, and the farmhouses and barns were built like fortresses in flat stone.

On the way to Leven we stopped at Largo. "Alexander Selkirk, the original of Robinson Crusoe, was born here in 1676." There was a statue of Selkirk in front of his birthplace, a cottage in Lower Largo.

"Its proper name is the Seatoun of Largo," a man next to me said. He had just boarded the bus, and we began talking about Largo and Selkirk. The man said, "Alexander Selkirk was a rogue! He was no good at all!"

I said that I had read somewhere that Selkirk had once kicked his mother and father downstairs.

"Aye, a rogue," the man said. "And I'm a direct descendant of his, on my mother's side of the family."

The man's name was David Gillis. He was ninety years old. It seemed my fate to be quite often encountering very old men. But it was these buses and trains — the old men didn't drive, didn't own cars, and I ran into them traveling. I was glad of it. David Gillis was bright-eyed and his hearing was fine. He could have been seventy or so. He was going to Leven to do a little shopping.

I was always interested to know what work these people had done. What had Gillis done seventy-five years ago, at the age of fifteen?

"I was apprenticed to a plumber in Largo and earned half a crown a week" — about twenty cents. "But it wasn't just plumbing I had to learn — all plumbers were tinsmiths and bell-hangers. I got my first job in 1906. I was offered a pound a week by a man in Largo, but I turned it down. I went to Glasgow and got two pounds. You see, the country employers used to take advantage of us."

He stayed in Glasgow for some years and eventually went to London, where his skills were in demand.

"Nowadays, plumbing is easy. You put in the pipes and the pump does all the work. But in those days we didn't have pumps. That made it very tricky work, because the flow had to be just right. And bell-hanging was a delicate thing. There was a bell in every room in the big houses. They worked on wires — no electrics at all. Bing went the bell and it would register on a panel downstairs, where the servants were. Bell-hanging was quite an art. No one does it now."

In 1941, Mr. Gillis' doctor in London said, "If you want your wife to live, you'll get her out of here." Her nerves were bad, and German bombs were tearing into the city. People asked him why he had come back to Largo, but he always said that if they spent two nights together in London with those bombs, they wouldn't ask.

In the mid-sixties the railway to Largo closed. It was the worst thing that had ever happened in this part of Fife. The end of the railway was the end of the village.

"It was a terrible thing," Mr. Gillis said. "Now we're twelve miles from a railway station, and the bus is awful. Some days it doesn't come at all. And it's getting worse. If I miss the bus, I have to wait hours in Leven. And there's nothing to do there — Leven is more dead than alive."

There had been a railway through Largo and all the way to Crail and St. Andrews, Mr. Gillis said. The buses had not replaced it, and who had the money to run a car?

Mr. Gillis, at ninety, was surprised at how slow and difficult it was for anyone to get from place to place these days. Years ago it had been very easy.

He confirmed my feeling that great parts of Britain were turning into what they were before the railway age. Villages were becoming crabbed and shrunken, and businesses were closing, and the people who stayed in rural areas became more and more tied to their houses. The urban areas were growing in population and becoming poorer, like Leven, the last stop. Areas of high unemployment like this had a distinctively sooty look and woeful air — not much traffic but plenty of people on the sidewalks. In these poor towns the people walked rather slowly.

In a report on Kirkcaldy, eight miles farther along the coast, half the sample of unemployed people described "wandering along the High Street" as a regular activity. They did not leave Kirkcaldy ("birthplace of Adam Smith, author of The Wealth of Nations"), because bus fares were too high. They could not afford to look for jobs elsewhere. I had bought a copy of this report. It was called Biding Time and subtitled "Reflections of unemployed young people in Kirkcaldy, 1982." Reflections was the wrong word. They were not particularly alarmed by the lack of work available. Unemployment was so common, there was no stigma attached to it; it was accepted as a permanent condition. The report noted that few of the young people expressed a "desperate willingness to do 'anything.'" There was always the dole and, for pleasure, the High Street to wander along. And while several were angry at their inability to find jobs, others had their own solutions: "One person was thinking about emigrating; one expected a prison sentence soon…"