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

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There was a good view of Holy Island from the train, on the east coast line. It appeared about ten miles south of Berwick, and because it was such a long island, it stayed in view for a number of minutes. More castles and ruins emerged on the low shore of ancient meadows. This part of Northumberland was flat, and today it had a great dome of clouds — an amphitheater with a ceiling of detached cirrus filaments tufting high over a whitish veil of undulant fluff and, below that, decomposing quilts of loose cumulus — this country was cloudland.

I was on the train because the strike was nigh. Soon, people said, there would be no trains. They seemed to like this doomsday drama. They whispered about it at Widdrington and Morpeth ("scanty ruins… and a curious clock-tower"). I had missed Amble-by-the-Sea — which sounded like a book title — and the Scars, but I did not have time to walk today. In any case, the speed of the train intensified the stains on the landscape and showed how quickly grassy pastures vanished into strange industrial cubism — rising chimneys and towers and the steel stick-figures of pylons, which made it almost zoolike, for the wires were crisscrossed against the sky, creating the impression of an enormous cage. This geometric clutter also suggested that we were rushing toward a populous place, and of course we were. It was the beginning of the great sad sprawl of the northeast of England, and even the riverine name of this poor county was like a laborious and demoralized sigh, Tyne and Wear. Newcastle was inland. I made for the coast.

This part of England had the highest rate of unemployment, and today in the sudden shower of rain at Jarrow ("whose name recalls unemployment and the hunger marches of the 20s") it had the poisoned and dispirited look of a place that had just lost a war. It was an area of complex ugliness — not just the dumps full of gulls and crows, and the weak defiance in the faces of the teen-agers I saw at Bolden Colliery; it was also the doomed attempts at survival: the farmer plowing a small strip of field behind an abandoned factory, and the garden allotments of shacks and overgrown enclosures, cabbages and beans, geese and pigs, vegetables and animals alike dusted with fine smut and looking cancerous. It was like a sight of China — black factories and narrow, necessary gardens, and a kind of visible hopelessness. It was one of the dreariest landscapes I had ever seen.

It was hideous and fascinating. We crossed the River Wear, and instead of continuing, I got off at Sunderland in order to verify its desolation. People said business was terrible, the place was dying on its feet. And Sunderland, because it was so depressed, had a dangerous look — the unrepaired buildings and the shabby streets, and the gangs of boys with spiky hair and long ragged coats or leather jackets painted over with fists and swastikas.

A man named Begbie who was a clerk at Binns Department Store said, "Some of the kids who left school six or seven years ago have never had a job. There are jobs in the paper, but these kids stay on the dole. They left school at sixteen and they developed what I call a dole-queue mentality. They're unemployable! They don't want to work, and they've discovered they don't really have to. They learned how to do without it. That's the main difference between the present and other times in British industrial history. We've produced a whole generation of kids who are unemployable!"

Begbie had a grudge, but though there may have been some truth in what he said, there really was no work here. I looked in the local paper at the want ads. Very few jobs were listed, and most of them asked for people with experience.

But Sunderland was not a lively nightmare of poverty. It was dark brown and depressed and enfeebled. It was threadbare, but it was surviving in a marginal way. The real horror of it took a while to sink in. It had stopped believing there would be any end to this emptiness. Its hellish aspect was the hardest to see and describe, because it had a sick imprisoned atmosphere: there was simply nothing to do there.

The weather made it worse. It was a summer afternoon but so stormy and dark that the street lamps were on, and so were the lights in the train. I moved south again on the coastal line toward Hartlepool. Even the sea was grim here — not rough, but motionless and oily, a sort of offshore soup made of sewage and poison. We passed the coal-mining town of Seaham, with its pits next to the sea and the shafts going under the sea floor. The house roofs were like flights of steps on the sloping coast and the slag heaps had rivulets scored into them from the drizzling rain. It was a completely man-made landscape, a deliberate monstrosity of defilement. It was as different and strange as a coastal town could possibly be, with the sooty symmetry of a colliery grafted on to the shore. I had never seen anything like it in my life, and oddest of all were the people — small children laughing in a barren playground, and families picnicking on the foul-looking shore, and a glimpse between the crusted roofs of men playing cricket in spotless white flannels.

I wondered in Hartlepool how people could stand to live in such a place. Mine was not the breezy condescension of a traveler but a sense of puzzlement at the state of decay. For most people there was no choice, but I also guessed that what made it bearable was the English people's habit of living indoors most of the time. They loved squashy sofas and warm rooms and the prospect of tea. What difference did it make that the town's graveyard was squeezed between the cement works and the metal-box factory, and that the steelworks that had disfigured half the town were now shut, and the rest of the place was just cranes and pipelines and Chinese allotments? Everyone agreed that it looked like a dog's dinner.

"You've got soup kitchens in the States," a man named Witton said to me. This was in Hartlepool. Witton was a self-employed decorator. He hadn't worked since Easter. "It's much worse in the States. I saw a program about it on the telly."

But Richard Jellyman, a traveler for Morgan Crucibles, told me that when he came up north he always made a list of people to see. Inevitably, half of them would have gone into liquidation between his trips. Recently he had made a list of nine places to go in Leeds — prospective clients or people he had done business with in the past. He found, on arriving in Leeds that week, that eight of them had gone bankrupt.

I came to Stockton. The railway station was very grand; this was understandable: the first public railway in the world steamed down this line in 1825. But Stockton seemed just as terrible as every other town I had seen in this area. At Middlesbrough I was told that if I was smart, I would look at the auctions in the newspaper. Each time a company went bankrupt, it auctioned everything — machinery, chairs, lights, desks, everything. I could get them at a good price and sell them in London. Out of curiosity I checked the newspaper and found it to be full of bankruptcy auctions.

"It's the blacks, see," a respectable-looking man named Strawby told me. "We whites are the original inhabitants of this country, but they make all the laws in favor of the blacks. That's why it's all gone bad."

Mr. Strawby saw me making notes. He was not alarmed. He gave me a little lecture on racial characteristics and offered me tea.

"You can get a soobstantial tea here," Mr. Strawby said at a Middlesbrough cafe, and handed me the tattered menu.

Chip-butty: a bread sandwich filled with fried potatoes. Pease pudding: green oatmeal. Black pudding: dark knotted entrails fat with pig's blood. Faggots: hard shriveled sausages that looked like mummified slugs.

I said I wasn't hungry.

This made Mr. Strawby smile. "Soom people don't know what's good for them."