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

From here France was close and had the same kind of cliffs, like the far bank of a great river. I could see the fissures in the chalk cliffs of Pointe Cambertin and Audresselles above Boulogne; and Cap Gris-nez and Cap Blanc-nez. Calais was just around the corner. It was not an optical illusion, but there was not the slightest tincture of Frenchness here. Some people water-skied to France when the weather was pleasant.

In Folkestone I met old Walter Dudlow as I was crossing the Leas, heading west. He asked me the time, but I could tell he wanted to talk. He was trembling to tell me things. He had once been a gardener up here on the Leas. That's why he was here now — he still liked looking at them. Most places in England changed, but Folkestone hadn't changed a bit. His wife had died; his dog was gone. He had fallen down, slipped on a patch of ice last winter, and hurt his knees. That was very bad. It had affected his dancing. Now he was dancing only two or three nights a week.

"How many nights did you dance before that?"

"Five or six," Mr. Dudlow said. "There's never any dancing on a Sunday, and even if there was I wouldn't go in for it, as a practicing Christian."

I asked him what kind of dancing.

"Old Time and Modern Sequence," he said. "How old do you think I am? Go ahead and guess."

Old people were forever asking me this — perhaps they asked everybody? I said about seventy.

"Seventy-nine, next birthday."

"I wouldn't have believed it," I said.

He said, "And I can touch my toes."

He tried. He couldn't touch them.

"It's my bally knees!" Mr. Dudlow said. "Usually I can touch my toes without any trouble. I didn't realize I couldn't until just then!"

I said, "You got pretty close."

"I always said I'm the fittest man in Folkestone." He was smiling, but he believed it. He said, "Are you married?"

"Yes," I said, smartly.

He winced a little and his face stayed stiff with surprise. If I was married, what was I doing on a weekday with a knapsack on my back, walking down the coast alone in these shoes?

"I mean to say if you weren't married, you'd make a lot of new friends by dancing," Mr. Dudlow said.

"Anyway, I am married — so dancing's probably not for me."

Mr. Dudlow shook his head and said, "You think walking down the coast is interesting, but I'll tell you dancing is much better."

I had told him I was walking down to Littlestone-on-Sea.

He said, "I go into a dance hall alone and come out with six or seven new friends."

"What kind of friends are we talking about, Mr. Dudlow? Men or women?"

"All kinds," he said. "It's my dancing, see."

Now I noticed that he had kept glancing at his feet. He had small feet and very smooth shoes, and his trouser cuffs were rolled up as if to draw attention to them. He was proud of his feet.

"I've always danced. You've got to be fit to dance. I've got a dance tonight here and another tomorrow in Dover. I'll go up on the afternoon coach."

He wanted me to exclaim about his effort so that he could smile and say that dancing kept him young. But I said I wasn't really much of a dancer.

"Even if you're a loner you'd like it," he said. So that was it: he thought I was a crazy loner. "I mean, it's better than being a loner." He looked from his tidy feet to my brown knapsack.

I said, "I never thought of dancing, except tap dancing."

"In that case you might like Modern Sequence," he said. "And what I like about it is there's no rough element. Know what I mean by rough element? Skinheads. Punks. These tough boys. Oh, you never find them in a ballroom."

We reached the last lawn in the Leas and there, at a stairway to the shore — the village of Sandgate at the bottom step — he said goodbye. But he kept on talking.

SANDGATE was a pretty, Irish-looking village squeezed between green cliffs and the narrow shore. It was full of antique shops and cottages, and it smelled of furniture wax and hot bread. But it straddled the main coastal road, and this curse meant that, although it was a tiny village, it was hard for any pedestrian to cross the street.

I walked along the beach. At the far end of the bay, to the southwest, on the tip of what looked like a great rusty sickle of seashore, was the ness — the nose — of the Denge Marsh. The new landscape feature at Dungeness was easily visible from where I was walking, because it was a nuclear power station, with an ugliness and a size peculiar to such constructions. It was not the gigantism that was nasty — the size alone could not be fearsome. But the unnatural look of nuclear power stations was daunting. They could not be prettified. Their horrific aspect, to someone staring at them across a calm bay, was their explosive shapelessness, the random swollen angles, and all those radiating power lines, like orbs of model shock waves. The nuclear power station at Dungeness from fifteen miles away was grotesque — there was nothing near it but the flat sea and the lip of Romney Marsh, which was a long green depression, below sea level.

There were eighteen nuclear power stations in Britain, and all of them stuck on the coast, perhaps for the same reason that they had shooting galleries and rocket ranges and minefields and dynamite factories on the same coast. If something went wrong, the surf and the sea would take the force of the blast. And it was easier to stand guard over such danger zones and prevent enemies from trespassing. But when one of these nuclear power stations blew up or melted down — and the chances were that one would — the map would be wrenched and a contour punched out of the coast, and Britain would not look like a witch riding on a pig anymore, but probably like a dwarf sprawled on a pork chop.

There was no one on the beach, no one swimming, no one walking, and no boats; but there was something I had seen before — at Margate, at Broadstairs, at Ramsgate, and Walmer, wherever a road came near the seaside: cars parked and piled up, and people in them, always very old people, the old croak named Rathbone in his toy Morris, and the Witherslacks, Donald and Maureen, both of them sitting in the back seat of their green Cortina, and everyone else. They sat in their cars and stared out at the sea. They were on every beach road. When I walked past, they hardly looked at me — perhaps a glance at the bulge in my knapsack, but not more than that.

If there was a place to park near a beach or a cliff, or any shelf of shore having a clear shot at the sea, the elderly people gathered there, side by side, their tin cars a little tremulous in the wind. I saw them everywhere, eating sandwiches, drinking tea out of plastic cups, reading the paper, looking fuddled. They always faced the water. They were old couples mostly, but they never seemed to be holding conversations. Often the man was asleep, and sometimes the woman was in the back seat and the man in the front ("I've got to have somewhere to put my sandwiches"). They were not bird-watchers or ship-spotters. Indeed, they did not seem to be looking at anything in particular. Their expressions were a little sad and empty, as if they were expecting to see something beyond the horizon or under the surface of the waves.

It looked somber enough to be an English recreation, but I wondered whether it had any other significance. It seemed to me to hold the possibility of the ultimate fright, an experience of nothingness. It was only on the coast where, if you angled yourself properly, you could look at nothing. I never passed these old people in their parked cars — they did not stir from them — without thinking that, in their own way, they were waiting for Godot.

I walked in a high wind and its flying grit to Hythe, where I saw a policeman wheeling his push-bike. I asked him if the little railway was still running down the coast. He said yes and directed me across town. "It's a mile," he said, "a long mile, really."