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

"And some people do," I said.

"Aye. That's true, right enough," Mr. Strawby said, and ordered a chip-butty.

***

STRIKE NIGHT, the Middlesbrough newspaper said and, in another Story, MAD KILLER LOOSE IN YORKSHIRE.

The Mad Killer overshadowed the railway strike. He was crazy and had a gun. He had already murdered three people, two of them policemen. There was particular anger directed against armed criminals in Britain, and cop-killers were especially hated, because few policemen were armed. People said, "Pretty soon it will be as bad as America, with all our policemen carrying guns." In Yorkshire the rural policemen carried nightsticks and rode bicycles and wore helmets that looked like old fire buckets. When they suspected foul play, they took out a little whistle and blew hard on it.

Barry Prudom, the killer, was psycho. He hated the police. It was said that he planned to wipe out the Yorkshire police force. He had been a commando. He knew how to live off the land. "Do not approach strangers," the police said in public warnings. They published Prudom's picture — he was unshaven, jug-eared, rather wolflike, and dark. HAVE YOU SEEN THIS MAN? the posters said. Four hundred people reported that they had. Every day there were fresh sightings. No one said his name. They said, "Haven't they caught that bloke yet?" People were giddy and talkative, excited by the danger. It was the classic example of the Mad Killer on the loose — a form of public theater.

Because of it, no one around here talked about the strike. This was very odd, because the entire railway network in Britain was shutting down tonight. I wanted to say But what about my trip?

Mr. Swales, the conductor on the 17:53 Middlesbrough-to-Whitby train, said, "They want to close this branch line. They've been trying to for years."

I thought: You might know! It was a beautiful line. But the opponents of these branch lines said that so few people used them, it would be cheaper to give the passengers taxi fare to their destination.

"This is the last train to Whitby," Mr. Swales said. "This is probably the last train to anywhere."

That was very British. The strike was not actually supposed to start until tomorrow, but the British impatience to wind a thing up — they characteristically left work early and always shooed the customers out of a store well before closing time — meant the strike would start this evening.

A fat lady named June Bagshawe said to Mr. Swales, "I don't know what I'm going to do without you!" She also shouted it into the guard's van and then out the window at every railway employee she saw. "I don't know what I'm going to do without you!" She used the train every day to get to her job at a knitting mill in Acklam.

But when she saw me, Mrs. Bagshawe hurried away heavily, pulling her legs along. And then I realized that, unshaven and square-faced and rather dark, I somewhat resembled Barry Prudom. I even had a knapsack like the former commando, and I wore commando-type oily shoes. She had taken me for the Mad Killer.

I sat alone. Ten minutes out of the gray trough of Middlesbrough, and this lovely train was passing through the green valleys of the Cleveland Hills in North Yorkshire. It was a bright evening — sunshine as soon as we were out of the city: it was like stepping out of a tent. All around the train were woods and fields and scarred hills, with trees blowing and earth the color of fudge. And at the rural station of Battersby ( What's a train doing here? you think, but it had once been a railway junction!) the wind was making the dog roses wag.

There is an English dream of a warm summer evening on a branch-line train. Just that sentence can make an English person over forty fall silent with the memory of what has now become a golden fantasy of an idealized England: the comfortable dusty coaches rolling through the low woods; the sun gilding the green leaves and striking through the carriage windows; the breeze tickling the hot flowers in the fields; birdsong and the thump of the powerful locomotive; the pleasant creak of the wood paneling on the coach; the mingled smells of fresh grass and coal smoke; and the expectation of being met by someone very dear on the platform of a country station.

It was like this tonight at Kildale and Commondale. The train halted in the depths of the countryside, the platform surrounded by daisies and buttercups, and the birds singing, and the leaves fluttering in the sunlight. A few people got out; no one got on. When the train pulled out of Castleton a small girl on the platform in a white dress put her fingers in her ears and stared with round eyes at the loud thing leaving.

There was great pride in the stations. At Glaisdale well-tended rosebushes rambled around the platform, and there were more at Egton and again at Sleights, and the train that had seemed miserable at Middlesbrough Station had been transformed, changing as it progressed up the line, growing emptier, brighter, more peaceful, and more powerful, until, where the River Esk widened just above Whitby, it seemed — the locomotive moving majestically through the dale — like the highest stage of civilization.

***

In Whitby, on its pair of steep cliffs, there was a sign saying vacancies in every guest house and every hotel. And yet the Horswills, Rose and Sid, were reluctant to give me a room in their hotel.

"My daughter said, 'If a single man comes for a room, don't let him in, Mum,'" Mrs. Horswill said nervously, still holding the door against me.

Mr. Horswill said, "There's this killer," and stared at my commando rucksack.

"You won't have any trouble finding a room in Whitby," Mrs. Horswill said. "Ordinarily, we'd be glad to put you up. It's just that—"

"I'm an American," I said.

"Come in," Mr. Horswill said, and forced the door out of his wife's hand. "We had Americans here in the war. They used to give us gum, lumps of steak, chops — they handed them out the window of their barracks. We went by and took them. Cigarettes — Lucky Strikes and that."

I asked him what the Americans had been doing in Whitby.

"Towing targets over the sea," Mrs. Horswill said, "and shooting at them from the cliffs."

Soon we were having cups of tea and reminiscing about the war and watching the news. The hunt for the Mad Killer was still on. " Police wish to interview Barry Prudom. They think he may be able to assist them with their enquiries. "

"Wish to interview!" I said.

"Wish to kick in the goolies," Mr. Horswill said, and winked.

Mrs. Horswill said, "I hope he's not cummin garound to see us."

That was how she talked, slowly and methodically fracturing her words. "If you nee dennythink, just say so," she said, and "Toffees — do you wan tenny?" She said she cooked "everthin gone that menu" and that Sid helped with "the washin gup." She said I could settle my bill on the "morny gov departure" and that I could take my room key with me if I was "goin gout."

I was the only guest in their twenty-room hotel. "A lot of people left yesterday," Mr. Horswill said. "If it's not the strike, it's the killer. They were getting nervy." But I peeked into the register. Only one couple had been there in the past five days, the Hallwarks from Darlington. So Sid was just trying to put up a good front. Things will pick up next month, these hotel people always said. But it did not seem likely, and it could be creepy, having a meal alone in a dining room with nineteen empty tables. It was like Lahore at Ramadhan.

The Horswills had given me the smallest room in the place. I had asked for a single. This was a literal-minded country and not given to the expansive gesture. I was three flights up, in the back, one of the few five-pounders, and every other room was empty.

The weather turned bad on my second day. Whitby people claimed that the weather was always much worse north of here — in Newcastle and Berwick. Mrs. Horswill told me how, a month ago, a woman had been walking along the breakwater extension ot the harbor, and a gale sprang up and swept the woman into the sea.