To the Ends of the Earth

I walked inside and upstairs, grabbed my knapsack, and hurried to the lounge, rehearsing a story that began, “This is my bird-watching gear. I’ll be right back—” The clerk was still watching television. As I passed him (he did not look up), the hotel seemed to me the most sinister building I had ever been in. On my way downstairs I had had a moment of panic when, faced by three closed doors in a hallway, I imagined myself in one of those corridor labyrinths of the hotel in a nightmare, endlessly tramping torn carpets and opening doors to discover again and again that I was trapped.

I ran down the Promenade to the bandstand and stood panting while the band played “If You Were the Only Girl in the World.” I wondered if I had been followed by the clerk. I paid twenty pence for a deck chair, but feeling that I was being watched (perhaps it was my knapsack and oily shoes?), I abandoned the chair and continued down the Promenade. Later, I checked into the Queens Hotel, which looked vulgar enough to be safe.

Llandudno was the sort of place that inspired old-fashioned fears of seaside crime. It made me think of poisoning and suffocation, screams behind varnished doors, creatures scratching at the wainscoting. I imagined constantly that I was hearing the gasps of adulterers from the dark windows of those stuccoed terraces that served as guest houses—naked people saying gloatingly, “We shouldn’t be doing this!” In all ways, Llandudno was a perfectly preserved Victorian town. It was so splendid-looking that it took me several days to find out that it was in fact very dull.

It had begun as a fashionable watering place and developed into a railway resort. It was still a railway resort, full of people strolling on the Promenade and under the glass-and-iron canopies of the shop fronts on Mostyn Street. It had a very old steamer (“Excursions to the Isle of Man”) moored at its pier head, and very old hotels, and a choice of very old entertainments—Old Mother Riley at the Pavilion, the Welsh National Opera at the Astra Theatre doing Tosca, or Yorkshire comedians in vast saloon bars telling very old jokes. “We’re going to have a loovely boom competition,” a toothy comedian was telling his drunken audience in a public house near Happy Valley. A man was blindfolded and five girls selected, and the man had to judge—by touching them—which one’s bum was the shapeliest. It caused hilarity and howls of laughter; the girls were shy—one simply walked offstage; and at one point some men were substituted and the blindfolded man crouched and began searching the men’s bums as everyone jeered. And then the girl with the best bum was selected as the winner and awarded a bottle of carbonated cider called Pomagne.

I overheard two elderly ladies outside at the rail, looking above Llandudno Bay. They were Miss Maltby and Miss Thorn, from Glossop, near Manchester.

“It’s a nice moon,” Miss Maltby said.

“Aye,” Miss Thorn said. “It is.”

“But that’s not what we saw earlier this evening.”

“No. That was the sun.”

Miss Maltby said, “You told me it was the moon.”

“It was all that mist, you see,” Miss Thorn said. “But I know now it was the sun.”

Looking Seaward

NOW I SAW BRITISH PEOPLE LYING STIFFLY ON THE BEACH like dead insects, or huddled against the canvas windbreaks they hammered into the sand with rented mallets, or standing on cliffs and kicking stones roly-poly into the sea—and I thought: They are symbolically leaving the country.

Going to the coast was as far as they could comfortably go. It was the poor person’s way of going abroad—standing at the seaside and staring at the ocean. It took a little imagination. I believed that these people were fantasizing that they were over there on the watery horizon, at sea. Most people on the Promenade walked with their faces averted from the land. Perhaps another of their coastal pleasures was being able to turn their backs on Britain. I seldom saw anyone with his back turned to the sea (it was the rarest posture on the coast). Most people looked seaward with anxious hopeful faces, as if they had just left their native land.

Insulted England

THE REST OF THE COAST, FROM THE WINDOW OF THE TRAIN, was low and disfigured. There were small bleak towns like Parton and Harrington, and huge horrible ones like Workington, with its steelworks—another insolvent industry. And Maryport was just sad; it had once been an important coal and iron port, and great sailing ships had been built there in Victorian times. Now it was forgotten. Today there was so little shipbuilding on the British coast it could be said not to exist at all. But that was not so odd as the fact that I saw very few vessels in these harbors and ports—a rusty freighter, a battered trawler, some plastic sailboats—there was not much more, where once there had been hundreds of seagoing vessels.