The Kingdom by the Sea

  There was a motor road to the Valley of Rocks. I had seen very few people all day; but this place, on every map, because Shelley had praised it and because it had a parking lot, had a hundred people clambering over the rocks and yelling. The rock piles had good names, such as Mother Meldrum's Cave and the White Lady and the Devil's Cheese Ring, but I skipped on to Lynton just the same.

  There was once a railway to Lynton. It was not open long, about sixty years. There was still a club in the village called the Lynton and Barnstaple Railway Association. Normally I had no interest in railway clubs and I avoided the company of railway buffs; but I liked the motto of this railway association in Lynton: "Perchance it is not dead, but sleepeth..."

  ***

  At about five-thirty in the afternoon, just after tea, everyone left Lynton. It became a deserted village and seemed to slumber there on the crest of the hill until the next morning, when it woke again with the hullaballoo of people. I thought the people went to Lynmouth, four hundred feet down the cliff on a small harbor. Old guidebooks called Lynmouth "one of the loveliest villages in England." But the people did not go to Lynmouth—that village was empty, too, full of VACANCIES signs and very quiet saloon bars and dim whispers; the only full-throated sound was that of the tide battering the seawall. The light was strange in these sister villages above and below the pinnacles of cliff; facing north and tucked into a cove, they lost the sun in the afternoon, so they were lit by the gleaming Channel and the near-mirage of Wales. But Lynmouth remained a cool glade, rather damp and sheltered on the banks of the two rivers that rose in Exmoor and converged among a battered and rather scoured-looking water course.

  Lynmouth had a rearranged, half-put-away appearance, because thirty years ago much of it had been demolished by a torrent of water. Even now, people visited the village to examine the damage done by the Great Lynmouth Flood Disaster. But where did they go after tea?

  A street-sweeper named Mr. Bedge told me the people were from Butlin's Holiday Camp in Minehead, eighteen miles away.

  I said, "But there are thousands of people!"

  "It's a big camp," Mr. Bedge said.

  I liked the liquid evening light in Lynmouth, but the village was clammy and full of shadows. Lynton had a whiter light, more sky, and a breeze; and even deserted, it looked rather dignified and old-fashioned on its clifftop.

  Next month there would be a movie one day a week in Lynton.

  "But if there are thirty people at that film show the owner will be pleased, and if there's fifty it'll be a bloody miracle," Sid Henry told me.

  Mrs. Henry said, "We're dying on our feet."

  There was a great deal of talk at the Henrys' and all over the village of Lorna Doone, which was set just down the road toward Porlock. But it was another example of literature giving an area an importance that in time had displaced the book. No one here had read Lorna Doone, but that didn't matter, because the district had already been hallowed by it, and now it was seen in a kind of blurred and respectful way. How could you possibly disparage a place that had inspired a famous novel?

  But there was a greater source of interest at the Henrys'. This was the honeymoon couple, a frail young man and a big laughing woman who was about five years older than her new husband. A silence fell over the dining room when the couple came down to breakfast: the Campbells stared into their porridge (they were Australian—nervous and uncritical); the Hibberts, from London, became small and watchful; and I pretended to read the newspaper. B. and G. Chandler (that was how it went in the Guests' Register, always one of my favorite books at any overnight stop) were the honeymoon couple. They took their seats at breakfast, and she talked and he squinted. Mr. Chandler looked terrible—pale, squinting, rather beaten; and Mrs. Chandler was robust, rosy-cheeked, full of talk, as if perhaps she fed off him at night. She made the plans—"Let's go to Clovelly today"—and he just sat there, grimacing.

  We wanted to hear him say something. We wanted to know what he was thinking. Most of all we wanted him to assert himself ("I can't take much more of this!"), but in two days he never spoke. He listened, he squinted, he grew a bit smaller; but that was all. And then the Just Married signs that had been stuck to their bumper and the Honeymooners! that had been scrawled in soap on the car doors vanished, and by the time they left Lynton, the Chandlers looked as though they had been married for twenty years.

  I left Lynton on the Cliff Railway, a cable car that descended to Lynmouth. I took a bus to Porlock, ten miles away. The road cut across the north of Exmoor, a rather brown forbidding place, and down the long Porlock Hill. The roads were so steep, there were signs on ramps saying, "Danger—Escape for Runaway Vehicles—No Parking" and "Warning to Pedestrians—Do Not Loiter Near This Bend—Danger from Vehicles Out of Control."

  Porlock, the home of the man who interrupted the writing of "Kubla Khan," was one street of small cottages, with a continuous line of cars trailing through it. Below it, on the west side of the bay, was Porlock Weir, and there were hills on all sides that were partly wooded.

  A hundred and seventy years ago a man came to Porlock and found it quiet. But he did not find fault. He wrote: "There are periods of comparative stagnation, when we say, even in London, that there is nothing stirring; it is therefore not surprising that there should be some seasons of the year when things are rather quiet in West Porlock."

  I walked toward Allerford, and on the way fell into conversation with a woman feeding birds in her garden. She told me the way to Minehead—not the shortest way, but the prettiest way, she said. She had light hair and dark eyes. I said her house was beautiful. She said it was a guest house; then she laughed. "Why don't you stay tonight?" She meant it and seemed eager, and then I was not sure what she was offering. I stood there and smiled back at her. The sun was shining gold on the grass and the birds were taking the crumbs in a frenzied way. It was not even one o'clock, and I had never stopped at a place this early in the day.

  I said, "Maybe I'll come back some time."

  "I'll still be here," she said, laughing a bit sadly.

  There was an ancient bridge at Allerford. I by-passed it and cut into the woods, climbing toward the hill called Selworthy Beacon. The woods were full of singing birds, warblers and thrushes; and then I heard the unmistakable sound of a cuckoo, which was as clear as a clock, striking fifteen. The sun was strong, the gradient was easy, the bees were buzzing, there was a soft breeze; and I thought: This was what I was looking for when I set out this morning—though I had no idea I would find it here.

  All travelers are optimists, I thought. Travel itself was a sort of optimism in action. I always went along thinking: I'll be all right, I'll be interested, I'll discover something, I won't break a leg or get robbed, and at the end of the day I'll find a nice old place to sleep. Everything is going to be fine, and even if it isn't, it will be worthy of note—worth leaving home for. Sometimes the weather, even the thin rain of Devon, made it worth it. Or else the birdsong in sunlight, or the sound of my shoe soles on the pebbles of the downward path—here, for example, walking down North Hill through glades full of azaleas, which were bright purple. I continued over the humpy hills to Minehead.

  9. The West Somerset Railway

  TO THE EAST, beyond the gray puddly foreshore—the tide was out half a mile—I saw the bright flags of Butlin's, Minehead, and vowed to make a visit. Ever since Bognor I had wanted to snoop inside a coastal holiday camp, but I had passed the fences and gates without going in. It was not possible to make a casual visit. Holiday camps were surrounded by prison fences, with coils of barbed wire at the top. There were dog patrols and beware signs stenciled with skulls. The main entrances were guarded and had turnstiles and a striped barrier that was raised to let certain vehicles through. Butlin's guests had to show passes in order to enter. The whole affair reminded me a little of Jonestown.

  And these elaborate security measures fueled my curiosity. What exactly was going on in there? It was no use my peering through the chain-link fence??
?all I could see at this Butlin's were the Boating Lake and the reception area and some snorers on deck chairs. Clearly, it was very large. Later I discovered that the camp was designed to accommodate fourteen thousand people. That was almost twice the population of Minehead! They called it "Butlinland" and they said it had everything.

  I registered as a Day Visitor. I paid a fee. I was given a brochure and a booklet and Your Holiday Programme, with a list of the day's events. The security staff seemed wary of me. I had ditched my knapsack in a boardinghouse, but I was still wearing my leather jacket and oily hiking shoes. My knees were muddy. So as not to alarm the gatekeepers, I had pocketed my binoculars. Most of the Butlin's guests wore sandals and short sleeves, and some wore funny hats—holiday high spirits. The weather was overcast and cold and windy. The flags out front were as big as bedsheets and made a continual cracking. I was the only person at Butlin's dressed for this foul weather. I felt like a commando. It made some people there suspicious.

  With its barrackslike buildings and its forbidding fences, it had the prison look of the Butlin's at Bognor. A prison look was also an army-camp look, and just as depressing. This one was the more scary for being brightly painted. It had been tacked together out of plywood and tin panels in primary colors. I had not seen flimsier buildings in England. They were so ugly, they were not pictured anywhere in the Butlin's brochure, but instead shown as simplified floor plans in blue diagrams. They were called "flatlets" and "suites." The acres of barracks were called the Accommodation Area.

  It really was like Jonestown! The Accommodation Area with the barracks was divided into camps—Green, Yellow, Blue, and Red Camp. There was a central dining room and a Nursery Center. There was a Camp Chapel. There was also a miniature railway and a chairlift and a monorail—all of them useful: it was a large area to cover on foot. It was just the sort of place the insane preacher must have imagined when he brought his desperate people to Guyana. It was self-contained and self-sufficient. With a fence that high, it had to be.

  The Jonestown image was powerful, but Butlin's also had the features of a tinselly New Jerusalem. This, I felt, would be the English coastal town of the future, if most English people had their way. It was already an English town of a sort—glamorized and less substantial than the real thing, but all the same recognizably an English town, with the usual landmarks, a cricket pitch, a football field, a launderette, a supermarket, a bank, a betting shop, and a number of take-away food joints. Of course, it was better organized and had more amenities than most English towns the same size—that was why it was popular. It was also a permanent fun fair. One of Butlin's boasts was "No dirty dishes to wash!" Another was "There is absolutely no need to queue!" No dishwashing, no standing in line—it came near to parody, like a vacation in a Polish joke. But these promises were a sort of timid hype; England was a country of modest expectations, and no dishes and no lines were part of the English dream.

  It was not expensive—£178 ($313) a week for a family of four, and that included two meals a day. It was mostly families—young parents with small children. They slept in a numbered cubicle in the barracks at one of the four camps, and they ate at a numbered table in one of the dining rooms, and they spent the day amusing themselves.

  The Windsor Sports Ground (most of the names had regal echoes, an attempt at respectability) and the Angling Lake were not being used by anyone the day I was there. But the two snooker and table tennis rooms were very busy; each room was about half the size of a football field and held scores of tables. No waiting! There was bingo in the Regency Building, in a massive room with a glass wall, which was the bottom half of the indoor swimming pool—fluttering legs and skinny feet in water the color of chicken bouillon. There was no one on the Boating Lake, and no one in the outdoor pool, and the chapel was empty. The Crazy Golf was not popular. So much for the free amusements.

  "Yes, it is true, nearly everything at Butlin's is free!" the brochure said.

  But what most of the people were doing was not free. They were feeding coins into fruit machines and one-armed bandits in the Fun Room. They were playing pinball. They were also shopping for stuffed toys and curios, or buying furs in the Fur Shop, or getting their hair done at the Hairdressing Salon. They were eating. The place had four fish-and-chip shops. There were tea shops, coffee bars, and candy stores. They cost money, but people seemed to be spending fairly briskly. They were also drinking. There were about half a dozen bars. The Embassy Bar (Greek statues, fake chandeliers, red wallpaper) was quite full, although it was the size of a barn. The Exmoor Bar had a hundred and fifty-seven tables and probably held a thousand drinkers. It was the scale of the place that was impressive—the scale and the shabbiness.

  It was not Disneyland. Disneyland was a blend of technology and farce. It was mostly fantasy, a tame kind of surrealism, a comfortable cartoon in three dimensions. But the more I saw of Butlin's, the more it resembled English life; it was very close to reality in its narrowness, its privacies, and its pleasures. It was England without work—leisure had been overtaken by fatigue and dullwittedness: electronic games were easier than sports, and eating junk food had become another recreation. No one seemed to notice how plain the buildings were, how tussocky the grass was, or that everywhere there was a pervasive sizzle and smell of food frying in hot fat.

  In that sense, too, it was like a real town. People walked around believing that it was all free; but most pastimes there cost money, and some were very expensive—like a ticket to the cabaret show that night, Freddie and the Dreamers, a group of middle-aged musicians who were a warmed-over version of their sixties' selves.

  If it had a futuristic feel, it was the deadened imagination and the zombie-like attitude of the strolling people, condemned to a week or two of fun under cloudy skies. And it was also the arrangements for children. The kids were taken care of—they could be turned loose in Butlin's in perfect safety. They couldn't get hurt or lost. There was a high fence around the camp. There was a Nursery Chalet Patrol and a Child Listening Service and a large Children's Playground. In the planned cities of the future, provisions like this would be made for children.

  Most of the events were for children, apart from whist and bingo. As a Day Visitor, I had my choice of the Corona Junior Fancy Dress Competition, a Kids' Quiz Show, the Trampoline Test, the Donkey Derby, or the Beaver and Junior Talent Contest Auditions. The Donkey Derby was being held in a high wind on Gaiety Green—screaming children and plodding animals. I went to the talent show auditions in the Gaiety Revue Theatre. A girl of eight did a suggestive dance to a lewd pop song; two sisters sang a song about Jesus; Amanda and Kelly sang "Daisy"; and Miranda recited a poem much too fast. Most of the parents were elsewhere—playing the one-armed bandits and drinking beer.

  I wandered into the Camp Chapel ("A Padre is available in the Centre at all times"). There was a notice stuck to the chapel door: At all three services prayers are being said for our Forces in the Southern Atlantic. I scrutinized the Visitors' Book. It asked for nationality, and people had listed "Welsh" or "Cornish" or "English" or "Scottish" next to their names. There was a scattering of Irish. But after the middle of April people had started to put "British" for nationality—that was after the Falklands War had begun.

  I found three ladies having tea in the Regency Building. Daphne Bunsen, from Bradford, said, "We don't talk about this Falklands business here, 'cause we're on holiday. It's a right depressing soobject."

  "Anyway," Mavis Hattery said, "there's only one thing to say."

  What was that?

  "I say, 'Get it over with! Stop playing cat and mouse!'"

  Mrs. Bunsen said they loved Butlin's. They had been here before and would certainly come back. Their sadness was they could not stay longer. "And Mavis' room is right posh!"

  "I paid a bit extra," Mrs. Hattery said. "I have a fitted carpet in my shally."

  It was easy to mock Butlin's for its dreariness and its brainless pleasures. It was an inadequate answer to leisure, but there
were scores of similar camps all around the coast, so there was no denying its popularity. It combined the security and equality of prison with the vulgarity of an amusement park. I asked children what their parents were doing. Usually the father was playing billiards and the mother was shopping, but many said their parents were sleeping—having a kip. Sleeping until noon, not having to cook or mind children, and being a few steps away from the chippy, the bar, and the betting shop—it was a sleazy paradise in which people were treated more or less like animals in a zoo. In time to come, there would be more holiday camps on the British coast—"Cheap and cheerful," Daphne Bunsen said.

  Butlin's was staffed by "Redcoats"—young men and women who wore red blazers. It was a Redcoat named Rod Firsby who told me that the camp could accommodate fourteen thousand people ("but nine thousand is about average"). Where did the people come from? I asked. He said they came from all over. It was when I asked him what sorts of jobs they did that he laughed.

  "Are you joking, sunshine?" he said.

  I said no, I wasn't.

  He said, "Half the men here are unemployed. That's the beauty of Butlin's—you can pay for it with your dole money."

  ***

  After Butlin's, my boardinghouse in the lower town seemed very tame. There were thirteen fragrant old ladies in residence for a week. They gushed about places like Wimbleball Reservoir and Clatworthy and Dunkery Beacon and the castle at Dunster. Sometimes they mentioned Lorna Doone in respectful tones. But they had read the novel. They were retired Welsh schoolteachers, very sweet-natured and precise and knowledgeable.