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

Though Yorkshire was always associated, with factories and mines, four fifths of it was open country, and the whole of its coast was countrified. I walked to Osgodby and then to Filey. On the way I passed through some woods and saw a man shouting at a small owl. This was Edgar Overend, a local naturalist. He explained that it was an owlet. "A foolish woman gave it to me to feed. I've been going mad trying to catch mice for it. If she'd left it alone, its mother would have looked after it. But no, she had to meddle! Now the little chap doesn't want to fly away."

The owlet sat on the ground, staring sadly at Edgar Overend.

"Of! you go," Mr. Overend said.

The owlet was uncomprehending. Then it twisted its head upward. A bird had just flown by.

"That's it— you fly," Mr. Overend said. "Shoo!"

The owlet didn't move.

Mr. Overend clapped his hands sharply.

The owlet jumped into the air and made for a treetop.

"At last!" Mr. Overend said. "He'll be all right."

At Filey I saw a holiday camp ahead and hurried to the road. I caught a bus and climbed to the top deck. It was like being in a boat riding the swells of a sea that was running high. I became seasick — nauseated, anyway — and descended to the lower deck. If there hadn't been a railway strike, I could have taken a train from Scarborough. At Bridlington, I took another bus to Flamborough Head, a headland and chalk stack so huge, I had seen it from twenty miles away as I had walked toward Scarborough. This, unfortunately, was one of the Yorkshire sights — a popular outing — so I did not stay, but instead took a bus south to Beverley, all the while cursing the buses.

It was another area of Disused Railway Lines. There was one from Hornsea to Hull, and another back to the coast from Hull to Withernsea. Farther south there had been a train from Louth to Saltfleetby and on to Sutton, Willoughby, and Skegness; and to Spalding and to King's Lynn. And now there were only straight paths in the woods and a dot-dot-dot on the map — sometimes not even that. And if you wanted to get to Catwick, Newbald, Swine, Warter, Sigglesthorne, Great Limber, Rise, Thorngumbald, or Burstwick, you tried to find a bus, but probably you walked.

Trains are different from country to country, but buses are pretty much the same the world over. This was why I stood in a long line of people at the bus shelter — no one knew when the bus was due — and waited for an hour or more on a windy road, and then saw it moving slowly down a road five hills away, and crowded in, and jounced for another hour to go fifteen miles, and I thought: Afghanistan. It was like traveling in a third world country, the sort of country that was always promising that as soon as it achieved a modest prosperity, it would build itself a railway. Buses were slow and sickening and unpredictable, and it was dreadful having to depend on them in Britain. Of course, there were long-distance coaches — but I was not going long distances; and there were city buses — but they were not much good to me. With the rain coming down and the railway strike in full swing, I needed a way of moving down the coast. But there was no reliable way. It took me almost an entire day to get from Bridlington to Hull, where I had a two-hour wait for the next bus out. I would have stayed, but Hull was not on the coast. It was all slow progress, and it got so that the very expression "Take a bus" began to sound as mocking to me as "Fly a kite."

In the end, the bus did not take me where I wanted to go. I was headed straight across the Humber to Barrow, but the bus went only as far as Barton. So I spent part of the afternoon walking to Barrow. Yet the prospect of finding the place excited me. I knew someone who lived here. Just that morning I had seen how near I was to it, and I thought: Why not pay the old boy a visit?

Ten years before, I had met Mr. Duffill on the Orient Express, going from Paris to Istanbul. His frailty and his shabby clothes had made him seem a little mysterious. He smelled of bread crusts. He carried paper parcels tied with string. He avoided questions. I took him to be an embezzler or someone in the midst of a strange fugue, bound for Turkey in a mouse-gray gabardine coat.

We had shared a compartment. One morning at Domodossola, on the Italian frontier, Mr. Duffill got off the train to buy some food — there was no dining car — and while he was still on the platform, the Orient Express began moving. Mr. Duffill went rigid, biting on his pipe. And then we were speeding to Milan without him. His name became a verb for me. To be duffilled was to be abandoned by one's own train. You got off at a sleepy place to buy some gum or a newspaper, and before you could get back on, the train pulled away, taking your suitcase, your clothes, your money, and your passport with it. The point was not merely that you were left behind, but that you were left behind in a strange country, figuratively naked.

I never saw Mr. Duffill again. I had left his suitcase and his paper bags at Venice with a note, and I had wondered whether he caught up with them and continued to Istanbul. Once, I had tried to call him, but he did not have a telephone. One of the few things he had told me was that he lived in Barrow-upon-Humber, in Lincolnshire — here.

It was a tiny place — a church, a narrow High Street, a manor house, and a few shops. It had an air of rural monotony that was like the drone of a bee as it bumbled slowly from flower to flower. No one ever came here; people just went away from it and never returned.

I walked down the street and saw a man.

"Excuse me, do you know a Mr. Duffill?"

He nodded. "The corner shop."

The corner shop had a small sign that said duffill's hardware. But it was locked. A square of cardboard in the window was lettered Gone on Holiday. I said out loud, "Goddamn it."

A lady was passing. This was Mrs. Marden. She saw that I was exasperated. She wondered if I needed directions. I said I was looking for Mr. Duffill.

"He won't be back for another week," she said.

"Where has he gone this time?" I asked. "Not Istanbul, I hope."

She said, "Are you looking for Richard Duffill?"

"Yes," I said.

Her hand went to her face, and I knew before she spoke that he was dead.

***

"His name was Richard Cuthbert Duffill. He was a most unusual man," said his sister-in-law, Mrs. Jack Duffill. She lived at Glynd-bourne, a bungalow just beyond the churchyard. She did not ask who I was. It seemed only natural to her that someone should be inquiring about the life of this strange man, who had died two years before, at the age of seventy-nine. He had been as old as the century — seventy-three the year he had stepped off the Orient Express at Domodossola. Mrs. Jack said, "Do you know about his adventurous life?"

I said, "I don't know anything about him." All I knew was his name and his village.

"He was born right here in Barrow, in the Hall cottages. The Hall was one of the grand houses. Richard's father was the gardener and his mother was a housemaid. Those were the days of servants The Hall was the manor — Mr. Uppleby was the Lord of the Manor — and of course the Duffills were servants, and rather poor…"

But Richard Duffill was brilliant. At the age of eleven he was encouraged by the headmaster of the village school to go to the Technical College in Hull. He excelled at math, but he was also a gifted linguist. He learned French, Latin, German, Russian, and Spanish while still a teen-ager at Hull. But he had become somewhat introspective, for when Richard was twelve his father died. Mr. Uppleby took an interest, but the young boy usually just stayed inside and read and did his lessons, or else he went for long solitary walks.

His main recreation was swimming, and his skill in this resulted in his becoming a local hero. One summer day in 1917 he was on a swimming expedition with some friends at a quarry called the Brick Pits, near the Humber Bank. One of the boys, a certain Howson, began to struggle. He shouted, and then he disappeared beneath the murky water. Duffill dived repeatedly after him and finally surfaced with Howson and dragged him to shore, saving the boy's life. A few days later, the Hull newspaper reported the story under the headline A PLUCKY BARROW BOY.