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

"They spen tevver so much time looking for her, and when they found her, she were naked. The sea were so rough, it strip toff all her clothes."

Mrs. Horswill was a little morbid on this subject. She kept track' of the Whitby lifeboat, its comings and goings, its rescues and disasters, how many saved, how many drowned, and whether they were British. She sat at the window of her hotel on the cliff, always watching and usually knitting.

"Lifeboat's goin gout," she said.

It returned empty, she reported.

"Lifeboat's goin gout again," she said an hour later, and in the same breath, "'A Tribute to Frank Sinatra,'" and smiled at the television screen.

They loved him in England, the older folk. In places like Uggle barnby they knew all the words to "Chicago." American crooners were very popular: Bing Crosby, Perry Como, and singers I had never heard of, and of the most obscure they would say, "Of course his grandmother was English." And dancers — Fred Astaire, Ginger Rogers; and figure skaters — they knew the names of the American ones ("Bert and Betty Woofter — ever so graceful — they won a gold at Husqvarna"). And corny American musicals, and "Dallas," and Dixieland jazz; and in the depths of the English countryside country and western music was popular, the farm laborers had side-burns, and sometimes one saw — as I did in Whitby — a man of forty with a tattoo on his arm reading Elvis the King — R.I.P.

The day before I left Whitby I was sitting on a bench, staring in the direction of the beautiful ruined abbey, and a woman of about fifty, with a bow-legged dog, sat down and we started talking. Her name was Mrs. Lettsom and she had a boardinghouse in Whitby, but her real ambition was to move to Sandsend, a mile up the coast.

"The houses there are smashing," Mrs. Lettsom said. "They say the people are posh," she added sadly, "but I don't mind."

A three-bedroom house in Whitby cost about £22,000, and in Sandsend £34,000.

"But it's a dream," Mrs. Lettsom said. "I'll never have that kind of money." She was looking in the direction of Sandsend. Then she turned to me and said, "So what do you think about this bloke, going around killing people?"

***

I decided to walk to Scarborough, about twenty miles down the coast, on a footpath called the Cleveland Way. I slipped out of Horswill Heights, crossed the harbor, and climbed the stairs up East Cliff, where in Dracula Lucy Westenra ("I was waked by a flapping at the window") went sleep-walking and got the horrors. Now instead of a vampire there was a tent and caravan site there at Salt-wick Nab. It was not messy, but it was very ugly, and it occurred to me that such places were reduplications in canvas and tin of the neighborhoods the people had left, little canvas Smethwicks and tin Pudseys jammed together, with a pub, a shop, and a video shed in the center.

The coast was littered with black wrecks and stoved-in hulks, and this path had cracks in it — parts of it had already fallen into the sea, a hundred feet down.

There was a young woman ahead of me, walking alone but moving briskly. When I came abreast of her she asked me the time, and I took this to mean that she would not mind talking to me. Her name was Hazel, she was thirty, and she was walking to Robin Hood's Bay just for the hell of it. She had red cheeks and freckles; she was a jogger; her husband was in a fishing competition in Whitby. She was not interested in fishing (I never saw a woman in Britain holding either a fishing rod or a cricket bat). She had been married for two months.

"I live a strange life," she said.

I was delighted to hear this, but when she explained, it did not seem so strange. Both she and her husband worked at night, eight-thirty in the evening until six-thirty in the morning, four ten-hour days and then a long weekend, Friday to Sunday. Henry worked in maintenance, and she was a cook in the staff cafeteria — head cook, actually — and she had been doing the job for six years.

The workers who ate in the cafeteria had a very tough union. Once they had threatened a strike over the food.

"I decided that we were wasting too much food," Hazel said. "So I changed the menu — two main dishes and two sweets. The men moaned, 'We'll go out on strike'—all that lark. The shop steward came to me and insisted that the night workers get the same four main dishes and four sweets — two hot sweets and two cold — that the day workers got. So that's what we have now, four main dishes, because the union says so. And we're back to wasting food. If one of the choices runs out, they abuse me. They get a full breakfast, too. They're well looked after. It's an American company."

Did she like working for an American company?

"In some ways they're just like the English," she said. "The management give themselves big fancy cars as perks. They don't need the cars for their work. They travel to work in them, same as we do. It makes me mad."

She cooked for seventy men. Cooking for two people was easy. She didn't understand people who complained about it. But she wished she got outside more. She wanted to do more running, perhaps run a fast marathon — she could do four hours and ten minutes, but that wasn't good enough. Henry always wanted to play Scrabble, but they had terrible rows when they played.

"This is what I like," she said, as we rounded the bluff called North Cheek. "This is fun."

But the cliffs were falling into the sea, and in places there were big bites out of the path and a detour through a wheatfield or under a fence. On certain stretches, I thought: This path won't be here next year.

Hazel was silent for a while, and then she said, "I wonder what's going to happen."

What was she talking about?

She said, "I read somewhere that they're closing down whole towns in Canada."

At Robin Hood's Bay ("a quaint irregular fishing village on a steep slope") I bought Hazel a drink and then set off alone along the bushy cliffs and lumpy green headlands. At Ravenscar there were shrieking schoolchildren. One said, "They just shot that bloke!" I knew exactly who the dead man was. Sometimes it was not like a country at all, but rather a small parish.

HIKING SOUTH on the teetering coastal path toward Scarborough, I took a wrong turn and stumbled onto a gravelly lane. It led in a wide straight way through the woods. It was so impressively useless a thoroughfare, I looked for it on my map. This sort of landscape feature was sometimes labeled Roman road (course of), and indicated by a broken line. But just as often it was identified as Disused Railway Line, and seemed just as ancient and just as derelict as a Roman road.

This thing had been part of the North-Eastern Railway, between Whitby and Scarborough. "The line skirts the coast, affording views of the sea to the right," the old guidebooks had said. But now there were only two alternatives: the footpath that was falling into the sea, and Route A-171, a dangerous speedway of dinky cars and whining motorbikes. And the railway had been turned into a bridle path — a degenerate step, since the railway had itself replaced the mounted traveler, the coach and four, and the horse bus.

The railway had not been profitable, only useful. And now, after a century's interruption of technology, horses had repossessed the route. I had seen this all over Britain — defunct viaducts, abandoned cuttings, former railway stations, ruined railway bridges — and I thought of all the lost hopes and all the wasted effort. Then, small dismantled England seemed simple and underdeveloped — and too mean to save herself — deceived by her own frugality.

I continued down the Disused Railway Line, marveling at the stupidity of it. They started by closing stations; then they cut the number of trains; then, with few trains and a reduced service, they could prove the line was losing money and not worth keeping; and then the line was closed for good and the tracks sold as scrap iron. And then it belonged to Ramblers and hackers; it was where people took their dogs to shit.