To the Ends of the Earth

It was a day at the seaside, and then back to their cottages in Great Snoring. They were not like the others, who had come to sit behind canvas windbreaks (“eighty pence per day or any portion thereof”) and read FOUR KILLED BY RUNAWAY LORRY OR WIFE KILLER GIVEN THREE YEARS (she had taunted him about money; he did not earn much; he bashed her brains out with a hammer; “You’ve suffered enough,” the judge said) or BLUNDESTON CHILD BATTERED (bruised tot with broken leg; “He fell off a chair,” the mother said; one year, pending psychiatric report). They crouched on the groins, smoking cigarettes. They lay in the bright sunshine wearing raincoats. They stood in their bathing suits. Their skin was the veiny white of raw sausage casings.

The tide was out, so I walked to Cromer along the sand. The crumbly yellow-dirt cliffs were like the banks of a quarry, high and scooped out and raked vertically by erosion. Halfway between Sheringham and Cromer there were no people, because, characteristically, the English never strayed far from their cars, and even the most crowded parts of the English coast were empty between the parking lots. Only one man was here, Collie Wylie, a rock collector. He was hacking amber-colored tubes out of the chalk slabs on the shore. Belamites, he called them. “Take that one,” he said. “Now that one is between five and eight million years old.”

I saw a pillbox down the beach. It had once been on top of the cliff, and inside it the men from “Dad’s Army” had conned for Germans. “Jerry would love to catch us on the hop.” But the soft cliffs were constantly falling, and the pillbox had slipped a hundred feet and was now sinking into the sand, a cute little artifact from the war, buried to its gunholes.

I came to Cromer. An old man in a greasy coat sat on a wooden groin on the beach, reading a comic book about war in outer space.

SEASIDE SPECIAL ’82 WAS PLAYING AT THE PAVILION THEATRE, at the end of the pier at Cromer. It was the summer show, July to September, every day except Sunday, and two matinées. I had not gone to any of these end-of-the-pier shows. I was nearing the end of my circular tour, so I decided to stay in Cromer and see the show. I found a hotel. Cromer was very empty. It had a sort of atrophied charm, a high, round-shouldered, Edwardian look, red brick terraces and red brick hotels and the loudest seagulls in Norfolk.

There were not more than thirty people in the audience that night at the Pavilion Theatre, which was pathetic, because there were nine people in the show. But seeing the show was like observing England’s secret life—its anxiety in the dismal jokes, its sadness in the old songs.

“Hands up, all those who aren’t working,” one comedian said.

A number of hands went up—eight or ten—but this was a terrible admission, and down they went before I could count them properly.

The comedian was already laughing. “Have some Beecham Pills,” he said. “They’ll get you ‘working’ again!”

There were more jokes, awful ones like this, and then a lady singer came out and in a sweet voice sang “The Russian Nightingale.” She encouraged the audience to join in the chorus of the next one, and they offered timid voices, singing,

Let him go, let him tarry,

Let him sink, or let him swim.

He doesn’t care for me

And I don’t care for him.

The comedians returned. They had changed their costumes. They had worn floppy hats the first time; now they wore bowler hats and squirting flowers.

“We used to put manure on our rhubarb.”

“We used to put custard on ours!”

No one laughed.

“Got any matches?”

“Yes, and they’re good British ones.”

“How do you know?”

“Because they’re all strikers!”

A child in the first row began to cry.

The dancers came on. They were pretty girls and they danced well. They were billed as “Our Disco Dollies” on the poster. More singers appeared and “A Tribute to Al Jolson” was announced: nine minstrel show numbers, done in blackface. Entertainers in the United States could be run out of town for this sort of thing; in Cromer the audience applauded. Al Jolson was a fond memory and his rendition of “Mammy” was a special favorite in musical revues. No one had ever tired of minstrel shows in England, and they persisted on British television well into the 1970s.

It had been less than a month since the end of the Falklands War, but in the second half of Seaside Special there was a comedy routine in which an Argentine general appeared—goofy dago in ill-fitting khaki uniform—“How dare you insult me!”

I could hear the surf sloshing against the iron struts of the pier.