To the Ends of the Earth

I watched for more. What I saw was ugly and interesting, but before I knew what was happening, the line cut inland, passing bramble hedges and crows in fields of silage and small huddled-together farm buildings and church steeples in distant villages. We had left the violated coast, and now the mild countryside reasserted itself. It was green farms all the way to Carlisle—pretty and extremely dull.

KESWICK PUNKS, a scrawl said in Carlisle, blending Coleridge and Wordsworth with Johnny Rotten. But that was not so surprising. It was always in the fine old provincial towns and county seats that one saw the wildest-looking youths, the pink-haired boys and the girls in leopard-skin tights, the nose jewels and tattooed earlobes. I had seen green hair and swastikas in little Llanelli. I no longer felt that place names like Taunton or Exeter or Bristol were evocative of anything but graffiti-covered walls, like those of noble Carlisle, crowned with a castle and with enough battlements and city walls to satisfy the most energetic vandal. VIOLENT REVOLUTION, it said, and THE EXPLOITED and ANARCHY and SOCIAL SCUM. Perhaps they were pop groups? THE REJECTS, THE DEFECTS, THE OUTCASTS, THE DAMNED, and some bright new swastikas and THE BARMY ARMY. And on the ancient walls, SKINHEADS RULE!

Some of it was hyperbole, I supposed, but it was worth spending a day or so to examine it. It fascinated me as much as did the motorcycle gangs, who raced out of the oak forests and country lanes to terrorize villagers or simply to sit in a thatch-roofed pub, averting their sullen dirty faces. I did not take it personally when they refused to talk to me. They would not talk to anyone. They were English, they were country folk, they were shy. They were dangerous only by the dozen; individually they were rather sweet and seemed embarrassed to be walking down the High Street of dear old Haltwhistle in leather jackets inscribed HELL’S ANGELS or THE DAMNED.

The graffiti suggested that England—perhaps the whole of Britain—was changing into a poorer, more violent place. And it was easier to see this deterioration on the coast and in the provincial towns than in a large city. The messages were intended to be shocking, but England was practically unshockable, so the graffiti seemed merely a nuisance, an insult. And that was how I began to think of the whole country; if I had only one word to describe the expression of England’s face I would have said: insulted.

Mrs. Wheeney, Landlady

I EXPECTED FORMALITIES—CUSTOMS AND IMMIGRATION—Larne was so foreign-seeming, so dark and dripping, but there was not even a security check; just a gangway and the wet town beyond it. I wandered the streets for an hour, feeling like Billy Bones, and then rang the bell at a heavy-looking house displaying a window card saying VACANCIES. I had counted ten others, but this one I could tell had big rooms and big armchairs.

“Just off the ferry?” It was Mrs. Fraser Wheeney, plucking at her dress, hair in a bun, face like a seal pup—pouty mouth, soulful eyes, sixty-five years old; she had been sitting under her own pokerwork, REJOICE IN THE LORD ALWAYS, waiting for the doorbell to ring. “Twenty-one-fifteen it came in—been looking around town?”

Mrs. Wheeney knew everything, and her guest house was of the in-law sort—oppression and comfort blended, like being smothered with a pillow. But business was terrible: only one other room was taken. Why, she could remember when, just after the ferry came in, she would have been turning people away! That was before the recent troubles, and what a lot of harm they’d done! But Mrs. Wheeney was dead tired and had things on her mind—the wild storm last night.

“Thonder!” she thundered. “It opened up me hud!”

We were walking upstairs under a large motto—FOR GOD SO LOVED THE WORLD, and so forth.

“It gave me huddicks!”

The house was full of furniture, and how many floors? Four or five anyway, and pianos on some of them, and there was an ottoman, and a wing chair, and pokerwork scenes from the Old Testament, Noah possibly, and was that Abraham and Isaac? The whole house was dark and varnished and gleaming—the smell of varnish still powerful, with the sizzle of a coal fire. It was June in Northern Ireland, so only one room had a fire trembling in the grate.

“And it went through me neighbor’s roof,” she said, still talking about the storm, the thunder and lightning.

Another flight of stairs, heavy carpet, more Bible mottoes, an armchair on the landing.

“Just one more,” Mrs. Wheeney said. “This is how I get me exercise. Oh, it was turrible. One of me people was crying—”

Mirrors and antlers and more mottoes and wood paneling, and now I noticed that Mrs. Wheeney had a mustache. She was talking about the reeyun—how hard it was; about breakfast at eeyut—but she would be up at sux; and what a dangerous suttee Belfast was.