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

For this, Duffill, a Boy Scout, was awarded the Silver Cross for Bravery. It was the first time this honor had ever come to a Lincolnshire scout. Some months afterward, the Carnegie Heroes' Fund presented Duffill with a silver watch "for gallantry," and gave him a sum of money "to help him in his education and future career."

In 1919, still young, and fluent in half a dozen languages, he joined the Inter-Allied Plebescite Commission and was sent to Allenstein, in what was then East Prussia, to deal with the aftermath of World War One — sorting out prisoners and helping at the Special Court of Justice. In the following few years he did the same in Klag enfurt (Austria) and Oppeln (Opole, Upper Silesia — now Poland). Berlin was next. Duffill got a job with the celebrated firm of Price, Waterhouse, the international accountants. He stayed in Berlin for ten years, abruptly resigning in 1935 and leaving — fleeing, some people said — for England.

Politically, he was of the left. His friends in Berlin thought he might be gathering information for the British secret service. ("One felt he would have made the ideal agent," an old friend of Duffill's told me.) In any case, he left Germany so suddenly, it was assumed that he was being pursued by Nazi agents or wolves from the Sturm Abteilung. He made it safely home, and he was also able to get all his money out of Germany ("an exceedingly clever and daring feat," another friend told me. "His fortune was considerable").

He may have had a nervous breakdown then; there was some speculation. He sank for a year, re-emerging in 1936 as a chief accountant for an American movie company. Two years later, a letter of reference said that Duffill was "thoroughly acquainted with various sides of the film trade." In 1939 there was another gap, lasting until 1945: the war certainly — but where was Duffill? No one could tell me. His brother said, "Richard never discussed his working life or his world-traveling with us."

In the late forties, he apparently rejoined Price, Waterhouse and traveled throughout Europe. He went to Egypt and Turkey; he returned to Germany; he went to Sweden and Russia, "for whose leaders he had the greatest admiration."

After his retirement he continued to travel. He had never married. He was always alone. But the snapshots he kept showed him to be a very stylish dresser — waistcoat, plus fours, cashmere overcoat, homburg, stickpin. A characteristic of natty dressers is that they wear too many clothes. Duffill's snapshots showed this; and he always wore a hat.

He wore a ruglike wig, I was told. "It stuck out in the back." He had had brain surgery. "He once played tennis in Cairo." He had gone on socialist holidays to eastern Europe. He hated Hitler. He was very "spiritual," one of his old friends said. He became interested in the philosophy of George Ivanovich Gurdjieff and was a close friend of the great Gurdjieff scholar John Godolphin Bennett. "And after a while Richard got frightfully steamed up about dervishes," Bennett's widow told me. That was why Duffill was on his way to Istanbul, she said — to renew his acquaintance with some whirling dervishes!

But what I wanted to know was what had happened to him after the Orient Express pulled out of Domodossola.

Mrs. Jack said, "He got out at a station. He didn't tell me where. He had left his luggage on the train. Then the train pulled out. He inquired when the next train was, and they told him the time — five o'clock. Only a few hours, he thought. But he had got mixed up. He thought they meant P.M. and they actually meant A.M. — five the next morning. He had a very bad night, and the next day he went to — where was it? Venice? Yes, he collected his luggage" — the paper bags I had left with the controllore —"and eventually got to Istanbul."

So he had made it!

I told Mrs. Jack who I was and how I had met Mr. Duffill.

She said, "Oh, yes, I read your book! My neighbor's son is an avid reader. He told us about it. He said, 'I think you should see this — I think this is our Mr. Duffill.' And then everyone in Barrow read it."

I was eager to know whether Mr. Duffill himself had read it.

"I wanted him to see it," Mrs. Jack said. "I put a copy aside. But when he came over, he wasn't too good. He didn't see it. The next time he came over I forgot about the book. That was the last time, really. He had his stroke and just deteriorated. And he died. So he never saw it—"

Thank God for that, I thought.

What an interesting man that stranger had been! He had seemed frail, elderly, a little crazy and suspicious on the Orient Express. Typical, I had thought. But now I knew how unusual he had been — brave, kind, secretive, resourceful, solitary, brilliant. He had slept and snored in the upper berth of my compartment. I had not known him at all, but the more I found out about him, the more I missed him. It would have been a privilege to know him personally, and yet even in friendship he would never have confirmed what I strongly suspected — that he had almost certainly been a spy.

AT GRIMSBY I bought a London paper with the headline RAIL-STRICKEN BRITAIN ROLLS ON! But nothing was rolling in Grimsby, not even a train for the three miles to Cleethorpes. Nothing had been rolling in Scarborough, where I had walked, or Hull, where I had wasted a day on a bus that had taken Mexican-style detours. (It was literally true that English country buses sometimes went backward.) Nothing was rolling at all: I never saw a train in motion during the long railway strike. The government kept claiming that a number of trains were operating and that the strike (the issue was drivers' work schedules) was halfhearted. London news always seemed shrill and untruthful upcountry, but this situation-normal news was a damned lie in Grimsby and a cruel joke in poor starved Cleethorpes.

On the bus to Cleethorpes, the man in the next seat, Jim Popplewell, explained that he was a carpet-layer. "But when times are bad, people stop buying carpets," he said. He was earning 50 percent less than he had two years ago.

"What do you think of the north?" he asked. He meant here.

"I don't think of this as the north," I said. After all, I had been to Cape Wrath, four hundred miles north of this.

"But this is the north," Mr. Popplewell said. "It's not half bad. Have a look at the Wolds."

"What exactly are the Wolds?"

"Woods," he said. "Some hills. You'll see them as you head towards Lincoln."

I said I would be sticking to the coast.

"Mablethorpe," he said. "Skeggy."

"That kind of thing," I said.

"I see. You just go from pillar to post."

He said it in a kindly way. I was sure he meant "from place to place." But his statement was nonetheless accurate.

Was Cleethorpes a pillar or a post? It looked a terrible place. I wanted to go away. But how? The only way I could have left was on foot, in the rain, sinking in the mud of the Humber Bank. So I stayed the night in Cleethorpes and watched filthy children playing Tiggy. It was a version of tag. Home was called the Hob. "If we tig the 'ob before 'e gets to the 'ob, we say 'on the 'ob.'" They were twelve-year-olds and a little wary of me. "It's okay," one called to the others, "'e's not a copper!" I must have seemed a little strange to them — all my questions. But I was lonely, I was killing time, I wanted to leave Cleethorpes — to go anywhere. I mentioned Mablethorpe. The salesmen in the hotel laughed at this. Mablethorpe was anywhere.

The salesmen were that dying breed of hustlers that I had first seen on the Kent coast at Littlestone-on-Sea. They talked about places being "shocking." They talked about their territory, calling it "my parish." These gents stopping the night at the Dolphin in Cleethorpes sold everything — brushes, plastic basins, outsized garments, double-glazing. One man told me he went a thousand miles a week in his car and made a hundred and eighty calls. He drove all over Lincolnshire and Yorkshire — automobile spares. A camera salesman told me that the profit on a hundred-quid camera was a fiver for a retailer — hardly worth the effort, since he could make the same profit selling four rolls of film. This man, Jessel by name, said, "We'll all be out of a job in a year or two. My job could be done by a computer. It wouldn't be the same — no human element, see — but it would be cheaper for my company."