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

The next day I walked back to Grimsby. I asked the way and a lady said, "You must be going to the docks."

Did I look like an able seaman? My coastal traveling had obviously taken its toll on my appearance. I was both flattered and appalled. Here I was, months after leaving Margate, still wearing my leather jacket and my oily shoes and my knapsack, and I suppose I was a little pigeon-toed from walking in a clockwise direction.

There had been stock-car racing and wrestling and bingo at Cleethorpes, but just next door in Grimsby there was the Caxton Theatre and the fish docks and a. sense that this had once been a bustling place and had only recently collapsed. The buildings and high-rise parking lots still stood, but they were empty. A sign at a Grimsby shop selling leathers and furs said, Coneys. I had never seen this old word for rabbit in an advertisement before — and it was also a famous word for "suckers."

The railway station was still shut. Only one bus today was going down the coast — the Ron Appleby coach to Mablethorpe. Well, that was my general direction. There were only five of us on board. I sat down and read the London papers again — more gloating, and what had already begun to be called "the Falklands' spirit." Had these past months produced a national shift of mood? "The travelling public are coping magnificently with the strike… Many people have found they can do quite well without British Rail," the Tory papers said. More lies. But the truth was pitiable: five dinks bumping down to Mablethorpe. My guess was that most people were coping with the strike by not traveling at all. That was the British way: inaction was a form of coping.

"Not a bad place is Grimsby," an old man in the bus said to me. His name was Sam Dunball and he had worked at the fish docks. He was retired now, and a good thing, too, he said. "The fish is gone and the docks is half-empty. Tt was the Cod War that finished Grimsby. We haven't been the same since. No, there's no fishing industry here anymore."

The so-called Cod War had been a legal dispute over Britain's traditional fishing grounds off the coast of Iceland. A two-hundred-mile fishing limit was declared by Iceland. There was a wrangle, which Britain lost. And the fishing industry in Britain was broken.

Mr. Dunball wanted to know what I thought of London.

I told him that I thought London was more like a country than a city. It was a sort of independent republic.

"I was in London once!" Mr. Dunball said. "It was before the war. Simpson's Hotel in the Caledonian Road, four-and-sixpence bed and breakfast. The doorknob, see, was in the middle of the door, and you pushed it and walked downstairs to the parlor. I was down there attending a course at Houndsditch Technical College. But it didn't do me a bit of good. I always wanted to go down for a Cup Final, but I never did. I just went that one time. I'll never forget it."

We skirted the Wolds — they looked like low rolls of fog in the distance — and then we traveled through the spinach fields of Lincolnshire. It was an area of great flatness, land like sea, and a wide sky of white vacant light. There was something about this even landscape and the four-square farmhouses and the geometry of the fields that hinted at moral probity and Bible-reading and rectitude. It was clear in the angles of the hedges and all the way to the straight, ruled horizon. The highest object in the landscape was the church spire, and this solitary pencil point was a kind of sanctifying emphasis that could be seen ten miles away. But it was all illusion, like the apparent disorder that made jungles seem savage to missionaries. And yet it was true that people who lived in sight of a flat horizon tended to build square houses.

At North Somercotes we passed Locksley Hall. I should have known it from the way it overlooked the sandy tracts and the long hollow ocean ridges.

O the dreary, dreary moorland! O the barren shore!

But was it really better, as the poem said, to have "fifty years of Europe than a cycle of Cathay"? It did not seem so in Mablethorpe, a flat, sad place modeled on a holiday camp and thronged with shivering vacationers. It was cold, but that was not the reason these people were scowling. This was the coast of last resorts. In other years these people had had their fish and chips in Spain, but there was less work now, and all their dole money got them this year was this place and Mumby and Hogsthorpe and Sutton-on-Sea. It was a dole holiday, a cheapie, and no more fun than a day out from the prison farm, some enforced fresh air, and then back to the classified ads and the Job Centre.

The caravan sites with their acres of tin boxes — whole caravan towns, in fact, tucked behind the duney shore — rivaled those I had seen on the coast of Wales. This was also a sort of miners' Riviera, for as we neared Skegness we passed holiday camp hotels. They had the look of painted prisons: the Nottinghamshire Miners' Holiday Home and the Derbyshire Miners' Holiday Centre and the huge wind-whipped Eastgate Holiday Centre at Ingoldmells. Fourteen applicants had expressed an eagerness to enter Eastgate's Miss Topless Competition — a tit show for amateurs — but the odd thing was that there were not enough vacationers to watch it, so the date had been pushed ahead to late August.

And then Skeggy itself — it deserved its ragged-sounding nickname. It was a low, loud, faded seaside resort. It was utterly joyless. Its vulgarity was uninteresting. It was painfully ugly. It made the English seem dangerous. And, at last, it made me want to leave — to take long strides down its broad sands and walk all the way to Friskney Flats. But there was no walking here — too muddy, too many of the canals and ditches they called "drains" here, and no path. There was no train, so I took a bus, or rather several of them, along the silty shore of the Wash, getting off at Butterwick and walking to Boston.

Boston's church — the Stump, they called it — was so tall and the land around it so flat that I was able to see it for a whole afternoon as I rode and walked toward it. From a distance it looked like a water tower, and closer like a gray stone lantern, and in Boston itself it resembled a stone crown on a pillar. This corner of the Wash was all a landscape of ancient churches separated by flat fields. I could not see the shore until I was on top of it, and it was impossible to walk there without getting wet feet. It was like the Netherlands — that white Dutch daylight and hard-packed sand and measured fields and plain old houses set in Calvinist clumps, with miles of vegetables between. The landscape was austere, but the place names were fantastic: Fishtoft, Breast Sand, Whaplode, Pode Hole, and Quadring Eudike; and a very ordinary street would have a name like Belchmire Lane. But it was so flat, you could see a mature poplar tree ten miles away.

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After more than a week of the railway strike, the management of British Rail said that they were breaking it. They said the drivers were showing up. They said the railways were being manned in a modest way. They said that all over the country people were traveling to work on trains—10 percent of the trains were running.

London news had always sounded a little strange when I heard it in places like Enniskillen, Mallaig, Porlock, or Grimsby. Now in King's Lynn it was perplexing to read of these running trains. There was none running in King's Lynn. The station was empty. It was another lie, like "Rail-stricken Britain rolls on." No one I saw was going anywhere.

King's Lynn was dignified and dull, its stately center so finely preserved, it looked embalmed; and grafted to it was a shopping precinct. This rabbit warren was all discount stores and boutiques and hamburger joints; it would not have seemed out of place in Hyannis, Massachusetts, though it was a little too vulgar for Osterville. King's Lynn's Skinheads and motorcyclists were particularly boisterous — these gangs seemed to me as much a part of the fine old market towns in provincial England as the period houses and the graceful windows, and they seemed especially to enjoy roaring down quaint cobblestone streets on their Japanese motorbikes. They called the bikes "hogs" in their gentle rustic accents.