The Kingdom by the Sea

  I was beginning to find the Puttocks a little trying. I had told them I was in publishing, and they pestered me with dull questions about books. They regarded books as clumsy, pointless things, and Donald Puttock smiled in pity whenever he mentioned them. What was the use? he seemed to say. He had no objection to them, but what was the good of them? He was entirely ignorant; he had a few harmless opinions. Mrs. Puttock had her dogs and her jigsaw puzzles. There was nothing more. Sometimes I imagined that they were terribly frightened.

  One night after the news—an invasion of the Falklands was predicted—I asked Mr. Puttock what he thought about the war.

  He said, "I don't know anything about it," and left the room.

  I wondered what his politics were, but when I asked him who his Member of Parliament was, he said he did not know.

  "We've been so busy for the past couple of years," Mrs. Puttock explained.

  If they had secrets I never learned them, but in a superficial way they had made it possible for me to invade their privacy for a few days.

  And then I was overcome with the in-law feeling of wanting to go—of stepping outside and never coming back. That morning I studied the weather forecast, because I would need fairly good weather for my walk along the cliffs to Padstow. The Telegraph said, "Scattered clouds ... occasional showers." Rut there was a large weather item on the front page:

  CLOUDS BEGIN TO THIN OUT

  Clouds from Wednesday's intense cold front began to thin out over the Falklands yesterday. Overcast low and broken high clouds still covered the islands and adjacent waters, but the heaviest weather was in the east and north.

  The deepening low pressure area was centred at the southern tip of South America.

  Fairly good weather meant there would be an invasion of the Falklands by British troops. On the other hand, I had no definite idea of what the weather would be like for me on the coastal path to Padstow.

  I slipped away from the Puttocks' bungalow, feeling sprung, and I hurried to the path. It was cloudy and slightly rainy, but the visibility was good and the path was firm. I could see the black headlands in the distance, Beryl's Point, after the sweep of Watergate Bay and Park Head and, in the smoky distance, the giant shadow of Trevose Head.

  I walked on. There was no greenery here. It had been torn away. There was only a thin meadow on top of the rock cliffs. The coast was high, hard, and gray, and the rocks split and wrinkled, some of them cleaved open. The coves were great jagged hollows of sloosh-ing surf and waves—what noises came out of the caverns under those cliffs! But it was familiar thunder, for this coast was like the coast of Maine.

  The paths were steep and narrow, and by the time I walked the five miles to Mawgan Porth I was ready to stop for coffee. There was a detachment of U.S. Marines guarding—what?—probably an atomic bomb on the cliffs here at Mawgan—but I did not meet them. I met the Wheekers, Marian and Bob, who had just rolled out of bed and were having tea, "and I wouldn't mind a bowl of flakes," Marian said. Her sparse hair was coppery with henna, and she sucked smoke out of the cigarette she had pinched in her fingers.

  "I'm tired," Mr. Wheeker said carefully, "because I 'ave just woke up. Heh."

  He looked at me and grinned to signal that he had intended a joke.

  I asked them whether they had heard the news on the radio—that an attack on the Falklands was expected.

  "I never listen to the news," Mr. Wheeker said. "Know why?"

  No, I said, I didn't know why.

  "Because there's nothing you can do about it. Right, my dear?"

  Mrs. Wheeker agreed, and then she narrowed her eyes at me and said, "Course, you people 'ave been criticizing us."

  I said I had been under the impression that the United States had given material support to the British and, because of it, had alienated the whole of South America. I wanted to tell him about the Monroe Doctrine, but he was at me again.

  "We're in this all alone," he said. "And the French are worse than the Americans."

  Mrs. Wheeker said, "My father always said, 'I'd rather have the Germans over here than the French.'"

  I said, "Do you mean the German army?"

  "The German anything," Mrs. Wheeker said. "It's them French I 'ate."

  A car drew up to the hotel and a family tumbled out, yelling.

  "Too many tourists 'ere, that's the trouble," Mr. Wheeker said. "That's why the Cornish are so unfriendly, like. They can't stick the tourists."

  "Course, that's where all their money comes from," Mrs. Wheeker said. "Kick out the tourists and they wouldn't 'ave a penny."

  "You're walking, then?" Mr. Wheeker said, his teacup shaking at his mouth.

  I said yes, along the cliffs.

  "How many miles you reckon on walking, then?" he asked.

  I said I averaged between fifteen and twenty a day.

  "We never walk," Mr. Wheeker said, and made it sound like self-abuse.

  "We 'ave walked," Mrs. Wheeker said.

  I said, "It's not much fun in this weather."

  "It's been trying to rain all morning," Mrs. Wheeker said.

  I smiled. That was one of my favorite expressions.

  "We never minded the weather," Mr. Wheeker said. "We walked fifteen or twenty miles— in an evening. In rain, snow, wind, anything—anything except fog. Never in fog. We couldn't stick fog."

  "And another thing about the Cornish," Mrs. Wheeker said, suddenly bored by her husband, who was almost certainly lying about all the walking. "The Cornish mispronounciate their words."

  This was wonderful. She mispronounced the word mispronounce!

  I remembered the Wheekers again later that day, because they were the only people I had met on the path, and when I arrived in Padstow I heard the news that the Falklands had been invaded: a British frigate, the Ardent, had been sunk and twenty-two men drowned, and a bridgehead established at San Carlos, and hundreds of Argentines killed. I especially remembered the Wheekers' bored silly faces and how little they cared.

  The River Camel was black that afternoon. Instead of crossing it I went to Wadebridge. I decided to return to the main line and Exeter, and take the branch line to the North Devon coast. I set out the next day, thinking: To be anonymous and traveling in an interesting place is an intoxication.

  8. The Branch Line to Barnstaple

  AMONG THE QUIET HILLS and meadows in the middle of Devon, this small train of three spruce coaches was the only moving object, and its harmless racket the only sound. It was one hour from end to end of the branch line, Exeter to Barnstaple, much of it along a stream called the River Taw, which the train crossed and recrossed. It was the last rural branch line in the shire.

  Because it was a remnant, soon to be swept away, it was greatly favored by railway buffs. Their interest always seemed to me worse than indecent and their joy-riding a mild form of necrophilia. They were on board getting their last looks at the old stations, photographing the fluting and floriation, the pediments and bargeboards and pilasters, the valencing on the wooden awnings, the strapwork, and—in architecture every brick has a different name—the quoins. They knew that when the line was closed, like the four others that had once been joined to it, every beautiful station would be sold to anyone who could raise a mortgage to turn it into a bungalow for a boasting family.

  It seemed odd to be inland after so much coast. I missed the drenching light, the sea boiling under the cliffs, the sound of surf on sand, which was like the sound of grieving. Here the landscape was motionless and silent, long low hills and withered villages—some were half-dead, like Copplestone, with its shut-down station and grass knee-deep on the platform. This branch line was old—finished in 1854—and it had always been useful. But it was faintly comic, as all country trains seemed as they jerked across the meadows and made the cows stare. This one was full of Bertie Wooster touches, especially in the names. It went through the Creedy Valley and on to Yeoford, Lapford, Eggesford, and Kings Nympton; Portsmouth Arms Station was actually a public house with
a funereal saloon bar, and Umberleigh was probably the setting of Jeeves Lays an Egg. Now we were in the valley of the Taw. We rattled into Barnstaple, which was a slightly frumpish, down-at-heels town on both banks of the muddy river.

  It was raining. The train passengers looked bored. But it was not boredom—it was the habitual patience that stiffened the English like a kind of hard glaze.

  Our arrival made them talkative. Few risked the subject of the Falklands War; it was only after the most violent incidents that people discussed it. They talked cautiously about the weather, their children, their health. "It's the bugloss that gets me this time of year," Mrs. Badgworthy said. And her friend Joan said, "I do hope they have a dry fortnight in Majorca"—worrying about someone else's weather.

  Barnstaple had become a sorry town. Once it had been a large railway junction, with three stations. Now it had only one station, and the line stopped dead, miles from the coast, leaving Barnstaple nowhere. It had a damp, haunted look that was partly dereliction and partly the result of the demolishing or conversion of its best buildings. Queen Anne's Walk, an elegant colonnade and building that had served as a riverside quay and bustling office for merchants and seamen for three hundred years, was now the Barnstaple Old People's Rest Centre—a worthy but melancholy end. It was a silted-up seaport at the end of a withering railway line.

  For the first time in weeks I saw crowds of hikers. They were young, they looked healthy, they had orange rucksacks, many were Americans. They had no intention of lingering in Barnstaple; they were setting out for Clovelly and Hartland Point, and their numbers discouraged me from doing the same. I felt somewhat inhibited: I imagined many of them to be travel-writers, with knapsacks full of notes. They asked me intelligent probing questions. I ran into the hikers all over town—I was fair game: I had a knapsack, too, and oily shoes and a rain-spattered map. Where was I going? What was I doing? They asked for details I could not supply. I escaped to Ilfracombe, on the north coast.

  The point about Ilfracombe, surely, was that it had not been designed for cars. It was a classic railway resort, with tall hotels and sloping streets. It had been built on a very steep hillside and was full of shifting perspectives of the Bristol Channel. There was a VACANCIES sign in every window. I could imagine people pouring out of the now-defunct Ilfracombe Station and heading for all those boardinghouses. In the twenties and thirties, Welshmen came by the thousands on the steam packets from across the water, and roistered up and down Ilfracombe, squandering their return fare on beer. It was a town for the stroller, not the driver. It was hard for cars to negotiate the streets, which were very steep and narrow; there was nowhere to park; and these hills made cars dangerous. Motor traffic had just about destroyed this dramatic seaside antique.

  The dark clouds over Ilfracombe turned the grass on the great swollen headlands very green. Henry James had tiptoed around the town in 1872 and found it overplanned and a little gimcrack. He usually objected to the settled and bricked-up look of the English watering places, but in Ilfracombe he sighed when he saw the handrails and signboards and the old ladies and sheep, and he wished with all his heart for "something more pathless, more idle, more unreclaimed from ... deep-bosomed nature." Of course, Ilfracombe now looked much more used and worn-out than it had then; but not far from it, and on many parts of the North Devon coast, it was easy to find deep-bosomed nature—just that, in fact, because the headlands were magnificent and bosomy and between them was always a steepness that the locals called a cleave.

  I walked to Hele Bay and Watermouth Cove. They were wooded and full of pink and blue wildflowers. There were pale spring flowers everywhere. No one could tell me their names. I came to Big Meadow and saw a sign:

  Welcome to Big Meadow!

  Sorry: No Motorcycles

  No Groups of Men

  No Dogs

  Combe Martin, farther on, was a small village on a rocky bay, in the shadow of two tall hills, the Little Hangman and the Great Hangman. As I walked into it, I could see the whole of it at the head of the bay—the houses, the bars, the hotels, the church—and then I was on its only street, strolling past the cottages. Their windows were open. At one I heard, "... seven more Argentine aircraft have been shot down" from a radio, and farther on, another radio saying that so far four hundred and fifty men had been killed in the Falklands' fighting.

  I found a place to sleep, by traipsing through the town in my usual fashion and sizing up the likely places. I had a shower and dinner—a pollock caught a few hours ago off this coast, and apple and bilberry pie. There were English people in the dining room, talking in whispers about food in a shy hungry way as they ate.

  It was in little country villages like Combe Martin that I saw the wildest and scruffiest youths, motorcyclists mostly—the sort banned from Big Meadow—who modeled themselves on Hell's Angels. I could not explain why they were most numerous in the prettiest villages in the countryside. They played pool in pubs with names like the Old Haymow and the Ploughman's Inn (these places now had jukeboxes and video machines), and they had tattoos and leather trousers and chains. They were the last people I expected to see in the depths of this countryfied coast, and it was oddest of all to see them, as I did in Combe Martin, drinking the local ale beside grizzled shepherds and fishermen. The commonest nighttime sound in the English coastal village, apart from the endlessly grieving surf, was that of the motorcycles farting down the main road at midnight.

  The hotel people in Ilfracombe and Combe Martin said business was terrible this year. Last year was terrible too. They had never known it to be so bad. They had very few firm reservations.

  Mr. Deedy at the Bull said, "See, no one wants to make plans ahead. They go on working. It's not only the money. They don't like to go away, because they don't know whether they'll have jobs to go back to."

  Then "Falklands Special" was on television, and we dutifully trooped toward Mrs. Deedy's shout of "It's the news!" The news was very bad: more deaths, more ships sunk. But there was always great bewilderment among people watching the news, because there was never enough of it and it was sometimes contradictory. Why were there so few photographs of fighting? Usually it was reporters speaking of disasters over crackly telephones. The English seemed—in private—ashamed and confused, and regarded Argentina as pathetic, ramshackle, and unlucky, with a conscript army of very young boys. They hated discussing it, but they could talk all night on the subject of how business was bad.

  "You just reminded me," Mrs. Deedy said. "The Smiths have canceled. They had that September booking. Mr. Smith rang this morning."

  "Knickers," Mr. Deedy said.

  "His wife died," Mrs. Deedy said.

  "Oh?" Mr. Deedy was doubtful—sorry he had said knickers.

  "She wasn't poorly," Mrs. Deedy said. "It was a heart attack."

  Mr. Deedy relaxed at the news of the heart attack. It was no one's fault, really—not like a sickness or a crime. This was more a kind of removal.

  "That's another returned deposit," Mrs. Deedy said. She was cross.

  "That makes two so far," Mr. Deedy said. "Let's hope there aren't any more."

  The next day I heard two tattling ladies talking about the Falklands. It was being said that the British had become jingoistic because of the war, and that a certain swagger was now evident. It was true of the writing in many newspapers, but it was seldom true of the talk I heard. Most people were like Mrs. Mullion and Miss Custis at the Britannia in Combe Martin, who, after some decent platitudes, wandered from talk of the Falklands to extensive reminiscing about the Second World War.

  "After all, the Germans were occupying France, but life went 011 as normal," Mrs. Mullion said.

  "Well, this is just it," Miss Custis said. "You've got to carry on. No sense packing up."

  "We were in Taunton then."

  "Were you? We were Cullompton," Miss Custis said. "Mutterton, actually."

  "Rationing seemed to go on for ages!" Mrs. Mullion said.

  "I still remember when ch
ocolate went off the ration. And then people bought it all. And then it went on the ration again!"

  They had begun to cheer themselves up in this way.

  "More tea?" Mrs. Mullion said.

  "Lovely," Miss Custis said.

  That was the day I left Combe Martin. I walked out of the village and climbed a thousand feet to the top of the Great Hangman. Down below I could see a headland that looked like a dog crouching with his snout in a puddle—the puddle being the Bristol Channel. Across the water, South Wales was a faint foreign blue.

  There were steep cleaves, beautiful and exhausting, all the way to Lynton. The hills rose plumply from the water's edge, and the path circled the hollows, treeless here and with such a pitch that, descending them, I usually slid and lost my balance, and, climbing, I found myself taking rapid stabbing steps that made my ankles sore. There was nothing to grasp, nothing to break my fall. In the middle of the cleave, way down and flowing from the head of the long valley, there was always a creek or a river, looking sometimes like a snail track and sometimes like a snake. It was this way for fifteen miles.

  At the bottom of one winding path was the village of Trentishoe. In 1891 it had a population of ninety-seven; now it had been reduced to forty-five. The church ("the second smallest in Devon") was the size of a one-car garage. I had said I was not going to do any sightseeing, but the village was nowhere and the church was insignificant and very pretty, so I went in. It smelled of Bible bindings and brass polish. Its list of rectors went back to the year 1260, seven hundred years accounted for. A notice said that a number of the graves in the churchyard were unknown people whose bodies had washed up on the shore in Elwill Bay, below this church, St. Peter's.

  I left the path near Heddon's Mouth and took the steepest way across the cut, on stony patches between the clumps of heather, and tugged back by thorns, and on all fours through the wildflowers, and skidding on loose chippings of shale. I found it slow going, but I was in no particular hurry. After that high hill I came to Martinhoe and then to a headland full of trees. These woods were wrecked and looked wonderful. It was called Woody Bay and was littered with fallen trees. They had blown down in the winter's hurricane-force winds and blocked most of the paths, making this part of the coast tangled and wild, with great splintered tree trunks. It was a marvelous ruin—still-alive trees fractured all over the floor of the woods.