To the Ends of the Earth

by Paul Theroux

  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.

  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.

  CHRIST JESUS CAME INTO THE WORLD TO SAVE SINNERS was the motto over my bedstead, in this enormous drafty room, and the bed was a great slumping trampoline. Mrs. Wheeney was sayi
ng that she had not slept a wink all the previous night. It was the thunder and the poor soul in number eight, who was scared to death.

  “It’s funny how tired you get when you miss a night’s sleep.” she said. “Now me, I’m looking forward to going to bed. Don’t worry about the money. You can give me the five pounds tomorrow.”

  The rain had started again and was hitting the window with a swish like sleet. It was like being among the Jumblies, on a dark and rainy coast. They were glad to see aliens here, and I was happy among these strangers.

  Belfast

  I KNEW AT ONCE THAT BELFAST WAS AN AWFUL CITY. IT HAD A bad face—moldering buildings, tough-looking people, a visible smell, too many fences. Every building that was worth blowing up was guarded by a man with a metal detector who frisked people entering and checked their bags. It happened everywhere, even at dingy entrances, at buildings that were not worth blowing up, and, again and again, at the bus station, the railway station. Like the bombs themselves, the routine was frightening, then fascinating, then maddening, and then a bore—but it went on and became a part of the great waste motion of Ulster life. And security looked like parody, because the whole place was already scorched and broken with bomb blasts.

  It was so awful I wanted to stay. It was a city that was so demented and sick that some aliens mistook its desperate frenzy for a sign of health, never knowing it was a death agony. It had always been a hated city. “There is no aristocracy—no culture—no grace—no leisure worthy of the name,” Sean O’Faolain wrote in his Irish Journey. “It all boils down to mixed grills, double whiskies, dividends, movies, and these strolling, homeless, hate-driven poor.” But if what people said was true, that it really was one of the nastiest cities in the world, surely then it was worth spending some time in, for horror interest?

  I lingered a few days, marveling at its decrepitude, and then vowed to come back the following week. I had never seen anything like it. There was a high steel fence around the city center, and that part of Belfast was intact, because to enter it, one had to pass through a checkpoint—a turnstile for people, a barrier for cars and buses. More metal detectors, bag searches, and questions: lines of people waited to be examined so that they could shop, play bingo, or go to a movie.

  Giant’s Causeway

  I BEGAN TO DEVELOP A HABIT OF ASKING DIRECTIONS, FOR THE pleasure of listening to them.

  “Just a munnut,” a man in Bushmills said. His name was Emmett; he was about sixty-odd and wore an old coat. He had a pound of bacon in his hand, and pressing the bacon to the side of his head in a reflective way, he went on.

  “Der’s a wee wudden brudge under the car park. And der’s a bug one farder on—a brudge for trums. Aw, der used to be trums up and down! Aw, but they is sore on money and unded it. Lussun, ye kyan poss along da strond if the tide is dine. But walk on da odder side whar der’s graws.” He moved the bacon to his cheek. “But it might be weyat!”

  “What might be wet?”

  “Da graws,” Mr. Emmett said.

  “Long grass?”

  “In its notral styat.”

  This baffled me for a while—notral styat—and then I thought: Of course, in its natural state!

  Kicking through bracken, I pushed on and decided to head for the Giant’s Causeway.

  BOSWELL: Is not the Giant’s Causeway worth seeing?

  JOHNSON: Worth seeing? Yes; but not worth going to see.

  I stayed on the coastal cliffs and then took a shortcut behind a coastal cottage, where I was startled by a big square-faced dog. The hairy thing growled at me and I leaped to get away, but I tripped and fell forward into a bed of nettles. My hands stung for six hours.

  The Giant’s Causeway was a spectacular set of headlands made of petrified boilings and natural columns and upright pipe-shaped rocks. Every crack and boulder and contour had a fanciful name. This massive coastal oddity had been caused by the cooling of lava when this part of Ireland had oozed during a period of vulcanism. I walked along it, to and from Dunseverick Castle—“once the home of a man who saw the Crucifixion” (supposed to be Conal Cearnach, a roving Irish wrestler who happened to be in a wrestling match in Jerusalem the day Christ was crucified).

  The basalt cliffs were covered with black slugs and jackdaws, and at seven in the evening the sun broke through the clouds as powerfully as a sunrise, striping the sea in pink. It was very quiet. The wind had dropped. No insects, no cars, no planes—only a flock of sheep baaing in a meadow on a nearby hilltop. The coves and bays were crowded with diving gulls and fulmars, but the cliffs were so deep, they contained the birds’ squawks. The sun gleamed on the still sea, and in the west above Inishowen Head I could spy the blue heights of Crocknasmug. Yes, the Giant’s Causeway was worth going to see.

  It had been a tourist attraction for hundreds of years. Every traveler to Britain had come here to size it up. There had been tram lines out to it, as Mr. Emmett had told me in Bushmills. But the troubles had put an end to this, and now the coast had regained a rough primeval look—just one stall selling postcards, where there had been throngs of noisy shops.

  This landscape had shaped the Irish mind and influenced Irish beliefs. It was easy to see these headlands and believe in giants. And now with people too afraid to travel much, the landscape had become monumental once again in its emptiness.

  In pagan Ireland cromlechs had been regarded as giants’ graves, and people looked closely at the land, never finding it neutral but always a worry or a reassurance. Hereabouts, there were caves that had been the homes of troglodytes. And it seemed to me that there was something in the present desolation that had made the landscape important again. So the Irish had been returned to themselves in this interval, and their fears restored to them, for how could they stand amid all this towering beauty and not feel puny?

  The Future in Enniskillen

  SOMEDAY ALL CITIES WILL LOOK LIKE THIS, I HAD THOUGHT in Belfast; and the same thought occurred to me in Derry and now in Enniskillen. The center of these places was a “control zone,” with an entrance and exit. All cars and all people were examined for weapons or bombs, and the tight security meant that inside the control zone life was fairly peaceful and the buildings generally undamaged. It was possible to control the flow of traffic and even to prevent too many people from entering. It was conceivable that this system would in time be adapted to cities that were otherwise uncontrollable. It was not hard to imagine Manhattan Island as one large control zone, with various entrances and exits; Ulster suggested to me the likely eventuality of sealed cities in the future.

  In Enniskillen each car in the control zone was required to have at least one person in it. If a car was left empty or unattended, a warning siren was sounded and the town center cleared. If the driver was found, he was given a stiff fine; if no driver claimed the car, the bomb squad moved in. This system had greatly reduced the number of car bombs in Enniskillen (only ten miles from the border). The last car bomb had gone off two years ago. The nicer part of Church Street was blown to smithereens—an appropriate Gaelic word—but it was a pardonable lapse, the soldiers said. That wired-up car seemed to have a person in it: how were they to recognize the difference between an Ulsterman and a dummy?

  Willie McComiskey, who described himself as a fruiterer, told me that Enniskillen had been pretty quiet lately—no bombs, not many fires, only a few ambushed cars.

  “What they do, see, is they go to isolated farms near the border. They take the farmer and stand him up and shoot him.”

  He seemed rather emotionless as he spoke, and he described how the men were sometimes murdered in front of their families—the wife and children watching.

  I asked him how he felt about it.

  He said in the same even voice, “Why, you wouldn’t do it to a dog.”

  “So what do you think of these gunmen?”

  “I hate them,” he said. He began to smile. What absurd questions I was asking! But he was uncomfortable stating the obvious. Here, such attitudes were ta
ken for granted.

  He said, “We’re eighty percent British here. We couldn’t have union with southern Ireland. A Protestant would have no chance. He wouldn’t get a job.”

  So McComiskey was a Protestant; that was his emphasis.

  “But I don’t think the IRA want union now. They don’t know what they do want.”

  From Enniskillen I walked south to Upper Lough Erne, one of the two enormous lakes here in County Fermanagh. The sun came out as I walked, and a milkman I met said, “The weather’s being kind to us.” There was no sound on these country lanes except the odd squawk of a crow. I found a hotel near the village of Bellanaleck, and now the sun was shining on the green woods and the lake. It was a sixty-room hotel. I thought I was the only guest, but the next day at breakfast I saw two Frenchmen in rubber waders—fishermen.

  “I have to check you for bombs,” Alice, the room girl, said.

  She followed me to my room and then peered uneasily into my knapsack.

  “I’m not sure what a bomb looks like,” she said.

  “You won’t find one in there,” I said. “It’s just old clothes—”

  “And books,” she said. “And letters.”

  “No letter bombs.”

  She said, “I have to check all the same.”

  I went for a walk. This was deep country. The pair of lakes went halfway across this part of Ulster. People spent weeks on cabin cruisers; Germans mostly. There were no English tourists here anymore.