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

This was spoken to me in a town (pop. 52, 000) on the coast of England in the summer of 1982. Hitchhike… that's the only sure way. Good God.

I walked a few miles to Kessingland and then stuck out my thumb.

"My mistake was stopping too long in my jobs. And this Jewboy," Mr. Marwood said wearily as we drove toward Southwold, "though I didn't have anything against his religion, took advantage of me. I was earning five pounds, ten shillings in 1948. It was a good wage — I was sixteen. I was on commission. I started to sell cheese rolls — this was a grocery store, and we did a little bit of greengrocery. The profit on cheese rolls was five hundred percent. My commission was sixpence in the pound. I worked very hard, but when my wages went up to seven pounds this Jewboy claimed he couldn't pay me. i don't have that kind of money,' he said. Imagine. So I left. I just told him what he could do with his job, and I found another one. There's always work for people who want it."

Southwold was one of those coastal villages which had become remote with the closure of its railway. It was now emptier and more rural than it had been twenty years ago. On a small house on Main Street there was a plaque saying The Author George Orwell (E. A. Blair) Resided Here. It was after he had been down and out in Paris and London; he had no money; he lived with his parents — this was their house. He got his pen name from a river some distance south of here on the Essex coast — the Orwell.

"I always pick up hitchhikers," Mr. Grainer said. There was no coast path to Dunwich, only marshes and an intrusive estuary. Mr. Grainer picked up a silent man and then a girl with a rucksack, all in the space of a few miles. He never passed a hitchhiker if he had a spare seat.

"It's a lot of wear and tear on a car," I said.

Mr. Grainer laughed out loud. "Not my car!" He was delivering it to a car dealer, he said. That was his job, delivering cars. He was so badly paid for doing it, he took his revenge by picking up every hitchhiker he saw. He laughed again. "My guv'nor would do his nut if he saw me now."

The girl said to call her "Jerry." She was on vacation. She taught school in Africa — the Sudan.

"We get a lot of spare parts from South Africa," Mr. Grainer said.

Jerry said that the Sudan was not anywhere near South Africa.

"All the same to me," Mr. Grainer said, cheerfully. "Cannibals and communists!"

Dunwich ("once an important seaport, before the sea swept it away") was a disjointed village scattered thinly against a lumpy green shore. Everyone said how sad it was that it was no longer prosperous, but its prosperity had come in the Middle Ages, and by 1800 it was an impoverished fishing village. Its empty, depopulated atmosphere inspired ghost stories, tales of sinking spells that traveled through Dunwich houses, and the legend of the Black Dog, a phantom hound that appeared at night in the village and caused acute depression. Dunwich was one of the strangest places on the coast — famous for no longer existing.

Many villages on this shore were associated with ghosts. It was the low boggy land, the marshes, the fogs, the shifting sands, the long tides, and the medieval churches of cracked stone. Here were some of the oldest Christian graveyards in England, and they lay in a landscape that cast forth ghostly mirages. Some of this atmosphere had been invented by Montague Rhodes James in his powerful stories of the supernatural. But his topographical descriptions could be very accurate, especially when (in "A Warning to the Curious") he spoke of approaching a town and seeing "a belt of old firs, wind-beaten, thick at the top, with the slope that old seaside trees have; seen on the skyline from the train they would tell you in an instant, if you did not know it, that you were approaching a windy coast." That was Aldeburgh.

So some fictional landscapes were still worth revisiting. Aldeburgh, too, had lost its train, and from eighteen trains a day (nine in, nine out), it was now a parking lot lined with exquisite buildings, with a shingly beach riding over its streets. The Moot Hall displayed a message from Buckingham Palace that had just been nailed up: "We were both most touched by your very kind message on the birth of our son. We have been overwhelmed by the reaction to this exciting event. Best wishes."

***

At the bottom edge of Suffolk, the coast collapsed in a mass of marshes and estuaries. There was no coastal path. Strictly speaking, there was no coast, but only forty miles of low waterlogged land, and isolated towns at the end of long flat roads. It corresponded to the complexity of the Scottish coast at the opposite end of the country, except that this was sand, not rock, and instead of surf whipping into cliffs, this had a shallow sinking look. It was in and out to Felixstowe and Harwich and the Naze; I was fighting the strike, but also finding it funny that I now woke up in Walton-on-the-Naze and, packing my knapsack and oiling my shoes and putting an apple into my pocket and saying goodbye to Mrs. Dumper at the Elms, set off like a man with a mission. I may have looked something like Robert Byron on the road to Oxiana, but in fact I was on my way to Frinton-on-Sea.

Frinton had its surprises. It was posh. Who would have guessed it from its name? There was a settlement of houses behind a fence with the sign Frinton Gates ; no trees — always an indication in an English suburb of a preference for rose gardens and herbaceous borders; large smug villas and a grassy Esplanade and not a chip shop in sight. It was a Tory stronghold; that was clear: you could tell by the tone of the golf club — by its forbidding gates. And Frinton was also sealed off from the rest of Britain. To get into the town it was necessary to go through a sort of valve, which was a level crossing on the railway line. It was a maddening bottleneck, but it had kept Frinton unviolated — it was the only way in or out of the place.

I walked on to Clacton, which was brash and noisy — holiday people, a holiday camp, trippers, and picnickers. I met a man named Arthur who said that if he had lived right, saved his money instead of losing it on the dogs, used his loaf instead of trusting people who had said they'd see him right, he would have ended up in Frinton in a detached house instead of a semidetached in Clacton. That was characteristic of the English: they did not allude to distant places on the coast when they were making comparisons. They would play with a mile or two and compare their lot in Bournemouth with what it might have been in Poole; they compared Brighton with Hove, Whitby with Sandsend, Exmouth with Budleigh Salterton. They did not reach far when they tried to imagine how their lives might have been different. And, really, Clacton wasn't so bad, Arthur said, when you compared it to Jaywick Sands.

"Jaywick's a shantytown," Arthur said.

It was. There was sand in the streets. People slept in the shallys. Most houses were shacks the size of one-car garages. Jaywick was crowded and cheap. It looked as though it had taken a terrific thumping — war or weather — and was awfully battered, like a seaside slum in Argentina or Mexico. It had the same grubby geniality, the same broken fences. The beach was empty. This was a Sunday in late July. Two women stood facing the murky sea. They were holding hands. I was especially fascinated by their affection, because the smaller one was pregnant. They were Roberta and Mandy; they had been living together in a borrowed bungalow at Jaywick for five months as a couple. Roberta had left her husband in Dagenham after she had met Mandy and realized she was a lesbian. She had been two months pregnant then. Mandy had been a tower of strength, and tonight they were going to a prenatal class of the National Childbirth Trust up in Clacton — breathing exercises and general awareness. Mandy said, "I'm her labor support." They were planning to raise the child themselves.