To the Ends of the Earth

“And you come and pour yourself on me,” a man was singing. It was a love song. The audience seemed embarrassed by it. They preferred “California Here I Come” and “When I Grow Too Old to Dream,” sung by a man named Derick, from Johannesburg. The program said that he had “appeared in every top night spot in South Africa and Rhodesia.” Say “top night spot in Zimbabwe” and it does not sound the same—it brings to mind drums and thick foliage.

One of the comedians reappeared. I had come to dread this man. I had reason. Now he played “The Warsaw Concerto” and cracked jokes as he played. “It’s going to be eighty tomorrow,” he said. “Forty in the morning and forty in the afternoon!”

His jokes were flat, but the music was pleasant and the singers had excellent voices. In fact, most of the performers were talented, and they pretended to be playing to a full house—not the thirty of us who sat so silently in the echoing theater. The show people conveyed the impression that they were enjoying themselves. But it can’t have been much fun, looking at those empty seats. Cromer itself was very dull. And I imagined these performers were miserably paid. I wanted to know more about them. I played with the idea of sending a message backstage to one of the chorus girls. I’d get her name out of the program. Millie Plackett, the one whose thighs jiggled. “Millie, it’s for you! Maybe it’s your big break!” Meet me after the show at the Hotel de Paris.… That was actually the name of my hotel, an enjoyable pile of brick-and-plaster splendor. But I didn’t look the part. In my scratched leather jacket and torn dungarees and oily hiking shoes, I thought Millie Plackett might misunderstand my intentions.

I stayed until the end of the show, finally admitting that I was enjoying myself. One act was of a kind I found irresistible—the magician whose tricks go wrong, leaving him with broken eggs in his hat and the wrong deck of cards. There was always an elaborate buildup and then a sudden collapse. “Presto,” he said as the trick failed. And then the last trick, the one that looked dangerous, worked like a charm and was completely baffling.

They saved the saddest song for the end. It was a love song, but in the circumstances it sounded nationalistic. It was sentimental hope, Ivor Novello gush, at the end of the pier that was trembling on the tide. I had heard it elsewhere on the coast. It was anything but new, but it was the most popular number on the seaside that year:

We’ll gather lilacs in the spring agine,

And walk together down a shady line …

Typical

ON MY LAST LONG TRUDGE, CURVING DOWN THE RUMP OF England on the Norfolk coast and into Suffolk, I thought: Every British bulge is different and every mile has its own mood. I said Blackpool, and people said, “Naturally!” I said Worthing, and they said, “Of all places!” The character was fixed, and though few coastal places matched their reputation, each was unique. It made my circular tour a pleasure, because it was always worth setting off in the morning. It might be bad ahead, but at least it was different; and the dreariest and most defoliated harbor town might be five minutes from a green sweep of bay.

This was the reason typical was regarded as such an unfair word in England. And yet there was such a thing as typical on the coast—but to an alien, something typical could seem just as fascinating as the mosques of the Golden Horn.

There was always an Esplanade, and always a Bandstand on it; always a War Memorial and a Rose Garden and a bench bearing a small stained plaque that said TO THE MEMORY OF ARTHUR WETHERUP There was always a Lifeboat Station and a Lighthouse and a Pier, a Putting Green, a Bowling Green, a Cricket Pitch, a Boating Lake, and a church the guidebook said was Perpendicular. The newsagent sold two GREETINGS FROM picture postcards, one with kittens and the other with two plump girls in surf, and he had a selection of cartoon postcards with mildly filthy captions; the souvenir stall sold rock candy; and the local real estate agent advertised a dismal cottage as “chalet-bungalow, bags of character, on bus route, superb sea views, suit retired couple.” There was always a funfair and it was never fun, and the video machines were always busier than the pinball machines or the one-armed bandits. There was always an Indian restaurant and it was always called the Taj Mahal and the owners were always from Bangladesh. Of the three fish-and-chips shops, two were owned by Greeks and the third was always closed. The Chinese restaurant, Hong Kong Gardens, was always empty; FOOD TO TAKE AWAY, its sign said. There were four pubs, one was the Red Lion, and the largest one was owned by a bad-tempered Londoner—“He’s a real Cockney,” people said, he had been in the army.