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

EVERYONE seemed to be going to China that year, or else writing rude things about the Arabs, or being frank about Africa. I had other things on my mind. After eleven years in London I still had not been much in Britain. I had not set foot in Wales or even East Anglia. People joked about Bognor Regis. I had never been to Bognor Regis. But I joked about it too! And where was Porlock? And was Northern Ireland a nightmare and Scotland breathtaking? And what exactly were the Lincolnshire Wolds? What I knew of Britain I had got from books. Britain was the most written-about country in the world. That was the problem, really. You read one book about China and you think you've got a good idea of the place; you read twenty books about Britain, even English Traits and Rural Rides, and you know you haven't got the slightest.

I lived in London for half the year, and the rest of the time went away. I had come to dislike the city. "A man who is tired of London is tired of life" — no, I was tired of hunting for parking places, tired of the crowds and the scribbled-on walls, the dirty old buildings and the ugly new ones. I was sick of London traffic and London presumptions and London smugness. And the gray underwear on London clotheslines hanging limply under baggy clouds made me sad. London did not regard itself as a city but rather as an independent republic. Sometimes it seemed as big as Belgium; it could take a whole day to cross it by car. I was also bored with London books, which had titles like Britain: What Went Wrong? and Is Britain Dying? London people said that what was wrong with Britain was wrong with the western hemisphere. Like many other London people I did not really live in Britain. This floating kingdom was a foreign country.

Britain was nearby, but "nearby" was misleading. Distances in Britain were meaningless — so many places were so hard to get to, or else hated outsiders, or were names of villages that no longer existed: so much of Britain lay buried. I knew a little bit about some parts, because in Britain there was an oral tradition that took the place of travel, like the Bognor jokes and Scotland was breathtaking and Cornwall was creepy and South Wales was awful and Rye was ever so lovely. Everyone appeared to know everything. It was word of mouth. Scotland had the Highlands, Cambridgeshire the Fens, and Norfolk the Broads — the words called up peaks and thickets and puddles. Northerners sounded to me as though they had learned English in language labs. In London, I had once mistaken a Welshman for a Dutchman — something in his inquiring voice. As for the Irish, I had never personally known anyone in London who took an Irishman seriously unless the Irishman was armed. "Bogtrotters," people usually said. "Micks are friendly!" I had never met a soul in London who had been to Northern Ireland.

I did not know anything, and I was beginning to think that I was as bad and lazy as everyone else.

Once, from behind a closed door, I heard an Englishwoman exclaim with real pleasure, "They are junny, the Yanks!" And I crept away and laughed to think that an English person was saying such a thing. And I thought: They wallpaper their ceilings! They put little knitted bobble-hats on their soft-boiled eggs to keep them warm! They don't give you bags in supermarkets! They say sorry when you step on their toes! Their government makes them get a hundred-dollar license every year for watching television! They issue drivers' licenses that are valid for thirty or forty years — mine expires in the year 2011! They charge you for matches when you buy cigarettes! They smoke on buses! They drive on the left! They spy for the Russians! They say "nigger" and "Jewboy" without flinching! They call their houses Holmleigh and Sparrow View! They sunbathe in their underwear! They don't say "You're welcome"! They still have milk bottles and milkmen, and junk-dealers with horse-drawn wagons! They love candy and Lucozade and leftovers called bubble-and-squeak! They live in Barking and Dorking and Shellow Bowells! They have amazing names, like Mr. Eatwell and Lady Inkpen and Major Twaddle and Miss Tosh! And they think we're funny?

The longer I lived in London, the more I came to see how much of Englishness was bluff and what wet blankets they could be. You told an Englishman you were planning a trip around Britain and he said, "It sounds about as much fun as chasing a mouse around a pisspot." They could be deeply dismissive and self-critical. "We're awful," they said. "This country is hopeless. We're never prepared for anything. Nothing works properly." But being self-critical in this way was also a tactic for remaining ineffectual. It was surrender.

And when an English person said "we," he did not mean himself — he meant the classes above and below him, the people he thought should be taking decisions, and the people who should be following. "We" meant everyone else.

"Mustn't grumble" was the most English of expressions. English patience was mingled inertia and despair. What was the use? But Americans did nothing but grumble! Americans also boasted. "I do some pretty incredible things" was not an English expression. "I'm fairly keen" was not American. Americans were showoffs — it was part of our innocence — we often fell on our faces; the English seldom showed off, so they seldom looked like fools. The English liked especially to mock the qualities in other people they admitted they didn't have themselves. And sometimes they found us truly maddening. In America you were admired for getting ahead, elbowing forward, rising, pushing in. In England this behavior was hated — it was the way wops acted, it was "Chinese fire drill," it was disorder. But making a quick buck was also a form of queue-jumping, and getting ahead was a form of rudeness: a "bounder" was a person who had moved out of his class. It was not a question of forgiving such things; it was, simply, that they were never forgotten. The English had long merciless memories.

***

There were no blank spaces on the map of Great Britain, the best-known, most fastidiously mapped, and most widely trampled piece of geography on earth. No country was easier to travel in — the British invented public transport. And yet I had seen practically nothing of it. I felt ashamed and ignorant, but when I began to think about traveling around Britain, I became excited — because I knew so little. I wanted to write about it.

Writing about a country in its own language was a great advantage, because in other places one was always interpreting and simplifying. Translation created a muffled obliqueness — one was always seeing the country sideways. But language grew out of the landscape — English out of England — and it seemed logical that the country could be accurately portrayed only in its own language. So what was I waiting for?

The problem was one of perspective: How and where to go to get the best view of the place? It was also a problem in tone; after all, I was an alien.