by Paul Theroux
Mr. Gifford, telling the story, had made himself sad. But Mr. Gussage had heard "Christmas" and was off.
"I've finished with all present-giving!" he shouted. "And I don't want to get any. I said to myself, 'I've decided now that I've moved permanently I don't want to get any presents.' I wrote everyone a letter saying, 'Please don't send me any gifts—just send me a suitable card.'"
Mr. Gifford was still damp-eyed with the memory of his father, the pipe, the tins of Ogden's. He said nothing to his companion.
"And do you know?" Mr. Gussage said. "They were relieved!"
Side by side on another seat were Mr. Bleaberry and Mr. Crake. They were also old; they were also shouting.
"First thing I do after we get settled in," Mr. Bleaberry said, "and if it's not raining, we'll go to the station and get timetables. I like to be up to date with my timetables."
This set Mr. Crake thinking. At last he said, "We used to go everywhere, my wife and I." There was a silence. "And that probably added fire to the fuel."
Dartmoor was on the right—the high rounded hill called Ugborough Beacon standing near other sudden bulges. In the meadows on the left side of the track lambs were fleeing from the train.
Raymond Greasely had been talking ever since the train had pulled out of Newton Abbot. Now he was saying, "...and my daughter is the pastoral assistant. There's a pastor, so she's the pastoral assistant. When she gets through with her studies she'll be a reverend. And she's still doing her journalism. How she does it all, I don't know. There's an abbey near her and the combined churches got together. I don't know about the Catholics. I think they stayed out. They always do, don't they? They call it a sin if they join up with anyone else. There was one big service at the abbey, everyone except the Catholics. My daughter's job, as pastoral assistant, was to read the lessons, two lessons. I'll bet she got a thrill out of that..."
A small old hunched-over man named Cox had sat in a rear seat and said nothing. He was looking out the window. What was it about train windows that made people remember? Train windows seemed to mirror the past. Mr. Cox stared and saw his face. After a time, even this very silent man spoke up.
"It's funny," he said, seeming to waken. "I've never shouted before or since, but I said to him, 'Stop picking on me—find someone else to pick on! I won't take any more of this from you!' It just came out. I was mad. He was a bully. Some people are never happier than when they're picking on someone. After that, when he came to check on my fire extinguisher"—what was that?—"he was very nice to me, we always had a chat."
This memory seemed to embarrass the others, but Mr. Cox was happy and even seemed to be savoring it.
"I think it's a detestable thing, picking on someone," he said. "I tried to bottle it up, but it made me bad-tempered. Then I shouted at him. It was the only time in my life. It just came out."
After the villages of Devon, Plymouth looked vast. It was scattered over several valleys, and farther in, it was on the hills as well. It was only the larger towns and cities of England that covered hills like this. The Plymouth outskirts looked ugly and dull.
"Busy, built-up place," Mr. Gussage said. "I remember my mother and father came to my wedding. They were country people, and this was Brighton. They said, 'Look at all them slate roofs!'"
Mr. Gifford was staring at Plymouth. He said, "Yes. Look at all them slate roofs."
7. The Cornish Explorer
A SPECIAL TRAIN TICKET I bought in Plymouth called the Cornish Explorer allowed me to go anywhere in Cornwall, on any train. I traveled into the low shaggy hills, which were full of tumbling walls and rough stone houses and yellow explosions of gorse bushes. I had lunch for £8 ($14), which was twice as much as my ticket. The dining car was set for eighteen people, but I was the only diner. Elsewhere on the train, the English sat eating their sandwiches out of bags, munching apples, and salting hard-boiled eggs. Times were hard. I realized that my lunch was overpriced, yet in a very short time there would be no more four-course lunches on these trains, no more rattling silverware, and no waiter ladling soup. But it was also ridiculous for me to be the only person eating: soup, salad, roast chicken and bread sauce, apple crumble, cheese and biscuits, coffee. There were two waiters in the dining car, and a cook and his assistant in the kitchen. The meal that most long-distance railway passengers had once taken for granted had now become a luxury, and Major Uprichard would soon be telling his grandchildren, "I can remember when there were waiters on trains—yes, waiters!"
There were rolling hills until Redruth, and then the land was bleak and bumpy. There was only one working tin mine left in Cornwall (near St. Just), but the landscape was scattered with abandoned mineworks, which looked like ruined churches in ghost villages. Cornwall was peculiarly uneven, with trees growing sideways out of stony ground, and many solitary cottages. On a wet day, its granite was lighted by a granite-colored sky, and the red roads gleamed in a lurid way; it looked to be the most haunted place in England, and then its reputation for goblins seemed justified. It was also one of those English places which constantly reminded the alien, with visual shocks like vast battered cliffs and china-clay waste dumps and the evidence of desertion and ruin, that he was far from home. It looked in many places as if the wind had screamed it of all its trees.
"I love the red earth," Mrs. Mumby said, staring out the train window at the drizzle and reminiscing. "During the war I lived at Ross-on-Wye, in an antiquated old cottage. These Cornish cottages remind me of that. I don't like the architecture of today. Concrete jungle, I call it."
Appearing to reply to this, Vivian Greenup said sharply, "I've looked everywhere for my husband's walking stick. My daughter brought it to the hospital in case he might need it. After he died, I looked everywhere and couldn't find it."
Mrs. Mumby stared at Mrs. Greenup, and her expression seemed to say: Why is Vivian running on like this about her dead husband's walking stick?
"It's quite a weapon," Mrs. Greenup said. "You could use it as a weapon."
We came to Penzance ("somewhat ambitiously styled the 'Cornish Riviera'...John Davison, the Scottish poet, drowned himself here"). I changed trains and went back up the line about seven miles to St. Erth, and there I waited in the rain for the next train to St. Ives.
There were few pleasures in England that could beat the small three-coach branch-line train, like this one from St. Erth to St. Ives. And there was never any question that I was on a branch-line train, for it was only on these trains that the windows were brushed by the branches of the trees that grew close to the tracks. Branch-line trains usually went through the woods. It was possible to tell from the sounds at the windows—the branches pushed the glass like mops and brooms—what kind of a train it was. You knew a branch line with your eyes shut.
We went along the River Hayle and paused at the station called Leland Saltings, which faced green-speckled mudflats. Hayle was across the water, with a mist lying over it. There were two more stops—it was a short line—and then the semicircle of St. Ives. It was Cornish, unadorned, a gray, huddled, storm-lit town on several hills and a headland, with a beach in its sheltered harbor. Today, in the rain, it was quiet, except for the five species of gulls that were as numerous now as when W. H. Hudson was here and wrote about them.
All the great coastal towns of England were a mixture of the sublime and the ridiculous. Here was the sublime climate and the pearly light favored by watercolorists, the sublime bay of St. Ives and the sublime lighthouse that inspired Virginia Woolf to write one of her greatest novels, and the sublime charm of the twisty streets and stone cottages. And there was the ridiculous: the postcards with kittens in the foreground of harbor scenes, the candy shops with authentic local fudge, the bumper stickers, the sweatshirts with slogans printed on them, the souvenir pens and bookmarks and dishtowels, and the shops full of bogus handicrafts, carved crosses and pendants. These carvings at St. Ives advertised "Our Celtic Heritage—The Celts were famous for their courage and fighting qualities, which carried
them before the birth of Christ from their homeland north of the Alps, across the known world ..." Cornish pride was extraordinary, and it was more than pride. It had fueled a nationalist movement, and though the last Cornish-speaking person died in 1777 (it was Dolly Pentreath of Mousehole), and Cornish culture today was little more than ghost stories and meat pies, there was a fairly vigorous campaign being fought for Cornwall to secede from England altogether. It was not for a vague alien like myself to say this was ridiculous, but it did seem to me very strange.
Across St. Ives Bay were sandy cliffs and dunes, and I thought of walking along that shore to the village of Portreath: it was about twelve miles; I could do it before nightfall. But the rain was coming darkly down like a shower of smut, and I still had my Cornish Explorer ticket. So I walked to St. Ives Head, where the Atlantic was riotous; then I returned to the station to wait for the little train to take me back to St. Erth.
The graffiti at St. Ives Station said, Wogs ought to be hit about the head with the utmost severity, and under this, Niggers run amok in London — St. Ives next! and in a different hand, Racism is a social disease—you should see a doctor.
I went back to St. Erth and changed for the main-line train to Liskeard, going back the way I had come, past the mining chimneys and the clay deposits and the great hard sweeps of stony land and the green glades that each contained a large house—one comfortable family—but no more.
The branch-line train to Looe was waiting at Liskeard. It ran on a single track through a narrow ravine under the main-line viaduct and made a big loop through the countryside, past ivy-covered walls and steep hills to Coombe Junction, where a man in a rubber raincoat yanked levers to change the points, nudging the train down the branch line to Looe and the coast. There were about twenty-five people on the three coaches of this train, and the train went so slowly, it did not even startle the horses cropping grass by the side of the track.
The woods on this rainy day were deep green. The branches bumped and brushed the windows. The nearness of the trees and the slowness of the trains were the best things about the branch lines.
We came to St. Keyne. There was a famous well here. "The reported virtue of the water is this, that, whether husband or wife come first to drink thereof, they get the mastery thereby." There is a ballad by Southey in which a man describes how, just after his wedding, he went to the "gifted Well" and had a drink, so that he would be "Master for life," but his wife was quicker-witted.
I hastened, as soon as the wedding was done,
And left my Wife in the porch;
But i' faith she had been wiser than me,
For she took a bottle to church.
Even so slight a poem as this seemed to give the acre of woods at St. Keyne a curious importance. This was true all over England, which was why England was so hard to describe: much of it had been written about by great men, and the very mention of a place in a literary work tended to distort the place, for literature had the capacity to turn the plainest corner of England into a shrine.
We came to Sandplace and then Causeland. The Looe River was hardly a river here—you could jump across it at Causeland—but then it widened from a creek into something more substantial, a waterway containing tussocky islands. On one of them there was a swan sleeping in a nest, looking like the fragments of a failed wedding cake, and the rocks of the shore looked nastily like dead ferrets. At the confluence of the West Looe and East Looe rivers we passed the steep narrow harbor of Looe, another apparently magnetized village, and a sign saying, "Headquarters of the Shark Angling Club of Great Britain."
It was still light, and I was stiff from my shuttling back and forth with my Cornish Explorer ticket. And the rain had finally stopped. So I oiled my hiking shoes and as night fell I walked along the coastal cliffs, past Hendersick and through the buttercups at the Warren above Talland Bay to Polperro. Just below Crumplehorn—I muttered the names to myself as I went—I found a pleasant-looking pub and got a room for the night. Everything seemed very simple and there was always enough daylight to do anything I pleased.
Polperro was a village of whitewashed cottages tumbled together in a rocky ravine on the sea. The streets were as narrow as alleys, and few of them could take motor vehicles. I saw a full-sized bus try to make it down one street—hopeless. At best, one small car could inch down a street, knocking the petals off geraniums in the window boxes at either side. When two cars met head-on there was usually an argument over who was to reverse to let the other pass.
The loathing for tourists and outsiders in Cornwall was undisguised—I had a feeling that it was the tourists who had made the Cornish nationalistic, for no one adopted a funny native costume quicker or talked more intimidatingly of local tradition than the local person under siege by tourists. Polperro was a pretty funnel but with the narrowest neck, so there was nowhere to go but the tiny harbor. It was true that the Cornish derived most of their income from tourists, but there was no contradiction in the way they both welcomed and disliked us at the same time. Natives always had very sound reasons for disliking outsiders; the Cornish fishermen had nothing whatever to do with tourists, but the other Cornish were farming people and treated tourists like livestock—feeding them, fencing them in, and getting them to move to new pastures. We were cumbersome burdens, a great headache most of the time, but at the end of the day there was some profit in us.
Mr. Tregeagle, the hotel-keeper I met in Polperro, had been a farmer for thirty years. He had dairy cattle, between sixty and seventy head, and he also grew vegetables. The month before I arrived in the village he had chucked his farm in Bodmin. He had bought this little hotel in the hope of making a living, but he laughed when he admitted that he had never run a hotel before and knew practically nothing about it.
"But I was losing thousands on my milk," Mr. Tregeagle said. "I owed money to the bank. The price of feed increased and the price of milk dropped. Last year it was terrible. I was in debt and I was working eighteen hours a day. I said to myself, 'What's the point?' I began selling my cows. I hated doing it, but I had no choice."
"What about your vegetables?" I said. "You could feed yourself, couldn't you?"
"The vegetables were useless. I had a garden full of lovely lettuces. One morning I brought three crates—about a hundred lettuces—down to the local greengrocer. He offered me a penny apiece for them. A bloody quid for three crates!"
"Did you sell them?"
"I took them home and buried them, and I plowed the rest of them under. And then I said, 'That's it—I'm selling.' The Tregeagles have been farming here for generations, but we'll never go back to the land again."
There was a South African couple at the hotel, Tony and Norah Swart. He was a fat and rather silent red-faced man in his mid-forties, and she was harder and younger, talkative and unsmiling, a girl with a grudge. Tony's silence was a kind of apology, for Norah was usually complaining, and she had that hypersensitivity which some South Africans have, the bristling suspicion that at any moment she is going to be accused of being a bumpkin, and the justified fear that she is a bumpkin—proud of and at the same time hating her snarling accent and bad manners.
It had been a horrible trip from Capetown. They had wanted to stop in Nigeria and Zaire, but those African countries would not let them enter. Norah Swart said, "It's bloddy unfair."
I said this was probably because Africans were discriminated against in South Africa. They treated Africans like dogs, so African countries were disinclined to put out the red carpet for South Africans.
"The real trouble," Mrs. Swart said, "is that we were too nice to them. When the Australians were shooting their Abos and you were killing your Indians, we were looking after our blacks."
"Of course," I said. "You're famous for looking after your blacks."
"Kristy, my Australian friend, said to me, 'If you'd shot yours like we did ours, you wouldn't have these problems today.'"
I said, "What a pity you didn't exterminate them."
"
That's what I say," Mrs. Swart said. The thought of mass murder softened her features and for the first time she looked almost pretty.
But her husband saw I was being sarcastic. He kept his gaze on me and went very quiet.
They especially hated the Africans in Namibia. They called it "South-West"; they said it belonged to them, they wanted to raise caracols there, and Norah Swart made a noise at me when I asked her what a caracol was. They said they would never willingly turn it over to African rule, but when I said that African rule was inevitable in Namibia ("Stop calling it Namibia," she said), the Swarts said they would fight for it. It was an empty land, Tony Swart said—only 400,000 people in it. He swore this figure was correct, but later I checked and found the population to be almost two million, of whom 75,000 were white.
I asked them where they had traveled in England.
"Lyme Regis," Mrs. Swart said. "Where they made that movie."
"We're just motoring down the coast."
"What was the name of that movie, Tone?"
Tony shook his head. He did not know.
Mrs. Swart said, "People around here keep telling us to read Daphne Du Maurier. Have you read it?"
She thought Daphne Du Maurier was the name of a novel. Instead of setting her straight, I said that it was a very good novel indeed and that the author, Rebecca something, had written many others. I urged her to ask for Daphne at the local bookshop.
Polperro was in such a deep ravine that the sun did not strike it in the morning. I walked through the damp dark village—straight overhead the sky was blue—and climbed out of the little harbor onto the cliffs just as a bright mist descended. It hung lightly over the rocky shore and the purple sea, and created luminous effects of live creatures appearing and disappearing near the tumbledown cliff was green, from the top to the sea, full of ivy and meadow grass and the foam sliding patchily back from the rocks. Bright and indistinct with shadowy light, and softened by mist, the whole coast that morning was like a Turner watercolor, or more than one, because it kept dripping and changing, the greens and blues becoming sharper as the morning wore on.