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

Of the four headlands nearby, the first was part of a private golf course; the second was owned by the National Trust and had a muddy path and wooden steps on the steep bits; the third — the really magnificent one — was owned by the Ministry of Defence and used as a firing range and labeled DANGER AREA on the Ordnance Survey Maps; the fourth headland was all rocks and called the Cobbler and His Dwarfs.

The Pier had been condemned. It was threatened with demolition. A society had been formed to save it, but it would be blown up next year just the same. There was now a parking lot where the Romans had landed. The discothèque was called Spangles. The Museum was shut that day, the Swimming Pool was closed for repairs, the Baptist church was open, there were nine motor coaches parked in front of the broken boulders and ruined walls called the Castle. At the café near the entrance to the Castle a fourteen-year-old girl served tea in cracked mugs, and cellophane-wrapped cookies, stale fruitcake, and cold pork pies. She said, "We don't do sandwiches" and "We're all out of spoons," and when you asked for potato chips she said, "What flavor crisps?" and listed five, including prawn, Bovril, cheese and onion, and bacon. There was a film of sticky marmalade on the tables at the café, and you left with a patch of it on your elbow.

The railway had been closed down in 1964, and the fishing industry had folded five years ago. The art deco cinema was now a bingo hall, and what had been a ship's chandler was the Cinema Club, where Swedish pornographic films were shown all day ("Members Only"). There was an American radar station — or was it a missile base? No one knew — it was a few miles away; but the Americans had kept a low profile ever since one American soldier had raped a local lass in his car at the Reach (she had been hitchhiking in her bathing suit after dark that summer night). A nuclear power station quaintly named Thorncliffe was planned for the near future a mile south of the Cobbler. Bill Haley and the Comets had once sung at the Lido. The new shopping precinct was a failure. The dog was a Jack Russell terrier named Andy. The new bus shelter had been vandalized. It was famous for its whelks. It was raining.

***

So I was prepared for certain things that lay between Cromer and Clacton-on-Sea; I could ignore what was typical and familiar, and I could concentrate on what was new. I moved on, toward Great Yarmouth and Lowestoft, sometimes walking and sometimes taking a local bus. The buses were the same width as the country lanes — and so I had to dive into the hawthorn hedges when they passed me. There were poppies in the peaceful fields. At Scratby there were shallys, and at the village of California a caravan park.

The villages in East Anglia were all sorts — small stingy-rich places, ruined settlements, tiny hamlets with long memories, collapsing churches surrounded by desolation, shally cities, and coastal horrors on rotting docks. Caister-on-Sea had been a Roman camp, and now it was a caravan park, just squat dingy houses, and pup tents, and "caravanettes," and a man in his underwear, lying on a small rug of grass by the roadside and sunning his spotty back as the traffic roared past. So much for the romance of Caesar's Caister. Place names were always misleading. Freshfields was always the semislum, and Messing, Turdley, and Swines always the pretty villages.

"Great Yarmouth, with its mile of Cockneyfied sea-front and its overflow of nigger minstrelsy, now strikes the wrong note so continuously that I, for my part, became conscious on the spot, of a chill to the spirit of research." Thus Henry James, fluttering his hands and perspiring and easing his big bum into the next train south. He had hoped to sit on the Front and sink into a reverie of David Copperfield and the Peggottys. But it was often a mistake in England to revisit fictional landscapes. Local people blamed the German bombing for Great Yarmouth's gappy, still-damaged look, but James's dismay was proof that the town had been just as raucous and profane a hundred years ago. Yet that was in itself interesting; aliens usually missed the point about England by investing its landscape with the passions of its great literature, and it had so seldom been seen plainly, without literary footnotes. Like England, Great Yarmouth's chief attraction was that it was no longer a place of reverential pilgrimage. It had long ago stopped being Dickensian.

There was a circus in town; there was all-in wrestling — Giant Haystacks was fighting a grudge match against Big Daddy. Space in My Pajamas was playing at a theater on the Front: "Miss Fiona Richmond, Live on Stage! A Non-Stop Nude Laughter Romp — the Ultimate Sexual Fantasy!" There were now two miles of sea-front — roller coasters, amusement arcades, shooting galleries. The town had swollen and burst long ago, but it had the English seaside characteristic of being self-destructive in its own way. The shows were popular and well attended, perhaps because they lacked the decent vulgarity of those at Cromer.

"That wally on the poster. I heard him on the flipping wireless."

The accents of Great Yarmouth's visitors were the accents of London — a certain class, sticking to old-fashioned expressions and stubborn intonations.

"Let's nip over one of them caffys."

And the two boys kicked at the traffic and hurried under the sign Frying for Dinner-Tea-Supper.

The coast between here and Lowestoft was poor for walking: it was populous and bungalow-ridden, and the only place to walk was on the main road. I hiked to Gorleston, a mile or so, and gave up. A new hospital had been built at Gorleston. It was flimsily made and very ugly; it also looked temporary and unsafe. The national poverty was now evident in public buildings, some of them almost unbelievable eyesores. She just let herself go, people said of the woman who got fat and stopped combing her hair. Sometimes Britain seemed that way to me. And it was too bad a hospital looked so inadequate, because Britain had the best public health service in the world and certainly the fairest doctors.

At Lowestoft I began to understand East Anglia's modest prosperity. Lowestoft had large produce markets and on its seafront a frozen food plant as vast as a power station. East Anglia was intensively farmed, and all those vegetables I had seen ended up here in ice bricks. After the failure of its automobile industry and its steel mills and its electronics factories, one of Britain's most notable postwar successes was growing Birds Eye spinach.

The railway station at Lowestoft was open, but when I asked a group of men gathered there whether there were any trains, they laughed.

"Come back September first," Mr. Fricker said.

They were all railwaymen. They were not picketing; they had just come to the station out of habit. They had nothing else to do.

"No trains at all," Mr. Beamish said. "This station is one hundred percent."

Mr. Holmesome, a driver, said, "Want to know the truth? The drivers here don't want to come out on strike. We're just doing it out of loyalty to the union. This isn't a busy station. It's only average. If the strike goes on, this will be one of the first stations to be axed, and then we'll lose our jobs, and we'll be in the shit with everyone else."

It was one hour and twenty minutes from Lowestoft to Ipswich. By bus it was almost three hours — it took all morning. It was a little over forty miles.

But I was headed down the coast for Southwold. I went to the bus station: Was there a bus? "Left an hour ago, squire" — "squire" because the news was bad, a further turn of the screw; sarcasm, not politeness. There was not another bus to Southwold today.

"I have to get to Southwold," I said.

"I'd hitchhike, if I were you," he said. "That's the only sure way."