The Kingdom by the Sea

by Paul Theroux

  The train climbed and paused. There were fifteen of us on it, and two got off. Then it picked up speed on a slope, and soon it was racing out of the hills, doing sixty or more, quite a speed for a little country railway train with squeaky wheels. We went on, tearing past the buttercups. We entered the plain that lay between the sea and the mountains, and on the plain's edge was the small seaside town of Borth, a straggling beachfront with the shadow of the Cambrian Mountains behind it. We swung east at the lip of the River Dovey, past Taliesin ("the grave of the Welsh Homer ... Taliesin, the greatest of the bards, Sixth Century...") and then along the riverbank. Aberdovey was under the hills at the far side of the estuary; this whole place was wonderful—the river valley about two miles wide and a great deal of it flat grassy marsh in which sheep were grazing, and the valley sides were gray hills and mountains.

  It was muddy and majestic all the way to Dovey Junction, where the river and the valley were shrunken. Because of its steady level progress, a train was the perfect way to see a landscape—it was impossible to be closer to the ground. And it was an excitement to travel up a contracting valley, from the broad river mouth to the creek at its narrow throat—it was like being swallowed.

  We came to Machynlleth ("believed to be the Roman Maglona"), where I saw a sign advertising the Centre for Alternative Technology. I asked directions and was told it was three to four miles up the road. I walked there through the woods and found it at Llwyngwern, at the southern edge of Snowdonia National Park, in an abandoned slate quarry. It was a settlement on a hillside and at first sight seemed no more than a jumble of ridiculous windmills and hand-cranked contraptions set among cabins and flapping plastic. The flapping plastic was part of the solar power units, but it was a dull day and no solar power was being generated. Here and there were signposts with homilies on little placards. I copied one into my notebook: "Waste is really a human concept, for in nature nothing is wasted—everything is part of a continuous cycle."

  The Centre for Alternative Technology was an elaborate and messy reproach to middle-class tidiness, a kind of museum of compost heaps and enormous and unfamiliar-looking toilets. There were buckets everywhere. Nothing was thrown away, and it was boasted that shit could be turned into valuable gas, and eggshells into rich humus, and this tin funnel labeled "Pee Can" was for collecting urine, "another valuable fertilizer."

  All of this was true, and there was a great deal of earnest work being done at the Centre to make it monumental, the apotheosis of a dunghill. Their gardens flourished. They made bran cookies and sprout salad and chunky vegetable soup, and their children had rosy cheeks. Wales was said to be full of communes like this, but the Centre charged admission and offered bed and breakfast. It was a happy-looking place, and if it seemed a trifle preoccupied with waste matter and a little passionate on the subject of bowel movements, it could be explained in terms of Welsh culture, in which both evangelism and toilet training figured fairly strongly. In any case, I was treated with hospitality by the Alternative Technologists. They regarded my knapsack as an indicator that I was one of them, deep down—and having seen what the old technology had done to South Wales, I think I was. Any alternative was better than the nuclear reactors on the coast, even the odd designs they were advocating, the harmless energy of solar panels and the superior, multipurpose shithouse.

  I walked back to Machynlleth. A grouchy guard at the station, Willy Bevan, said he didn't bloody know which was the next bloody train to Barmouth. He consulted his timetable.

  "Two-thirteen. But there's an 'E' on it. What does that bloody mean?"

  He checked the footnote.

  "Not on Sundays," he said. "Today's bloody Friday."

  He consulted the timetable again.

  "And one at two-forty-eight. But there's an 'A' on it. What does that bloody mean?"

  He checked that footnote.

  "Saturdays only," he said. "So the next bloody train—"

  I went down the line in a small train to Dovey Junction and I continued on a second train to Barmouth. The junction was in the middle of the river valley, just a halt in a marsh, but the other train was waiting for this one as we drew in. The remote branch lines of Wales were run with efficiency and pride. The services were frequent, even here, and I could easily have crossed the line and taken a train to Shrewsbury and been in London in time for dinner.

  The train traveled seaward along the north bank of the river, and then westerly into the glare of the afternoon sun skipping through the marsh. Tracking around a hillside on a ledge, the train swung away from the wide estuary of the Dovey, and its shore of sand and broken slate, and then north to Aberdovey—houses on the steep hillside, tin caravans on the beach.

  Caravans—it soon became obvious—were the curse of the Welsh coast. They were technically mobile homes, but they were not mobile. At best they were tin boxes, the shape of shoe boxes—including the lids—anchored in a field next to the sea, fifty or a hundred at a time, in various faded colors. Sometimes they were plunked down on slabs of concrete, and where there were more than a hundred—I counted over three hundred in some places—there was a fish-and-chip shop and a tin shower and another tin outhouse with a sign saying conveniences. What fresh water there was came from a standpipe surrounded by squashy mud. The whole affair put me in mind of nomads or refugees, certain Afghans or Somalis or Kurds, or the dizziest Gypsies who had perhaps made a little money but refused to abandon their old ways, sending their womenfolk out for buckets of water. You wondered how they could stand it so close to each other in such tiny unsheltered quarters, and you also began to ask the questions that true savages inspired—not the civilized Afghans or Somalis, but those people in remote parts who looked so naked and uncomfortable, you wondered how they washed and ate and kept dry and did their business. And there was something totally savage in the way they did not notice the incongruity of the settlement, how ugly it was, how beautiful the beach. The caravan settlements were always hideous and always in the loveliest coves.

  They were English people, of course, encouraged by the Welsh to have a cheap holiday here. Some lived in orange tents at the margins of the caravan fields. It was always a lurid sight on a hot day, the pink people reading the Sun in front of the orange tents, making cups of tea on little flaming tin stoves.

  It was like the nuclear power stations and the junkyards and the shallys and sewage farms: you could do anything you liked on the British coast, beside the uncomplaining sea. The seaside belonged to everyone.

  After Tywyn and more caravan camps, the train climbed to open cliffs and traveled through rocky sheep pastures, and then near Fair-bourne passed the foot of Cader Idris ("the chair of the giant Idris"), a high ridge with a three-thousand-foot peak, which was one of the most beautifully shaped mountains in England. Then across the bar of the Mawddach estuary, with the watering place of Barmouth lying under a hill. The river was wide and purple-blue in the lowering sun, with flat sandy banks rising to steep hillsides and more mountains. Barmouth looked to be a place of great refreshment, but closer it was excruciating, much too small to contain the mobs, not enough parking lots or sidewalks. The sunburned people were milling around, and—unusual on the coast—the train cut right through the middle of town; everything was halted and tangled while the train made its stop, and Barmouth was suddenly full of pedestrians impatient to cross the line.

  I had thought of getting off at Barmouth, but I changed my mind when I saw the numbers of people—in fact, I did get off, but I hurried back on, not wanting to be duffilled. And I had another reason: there was a note in the Cambrian Coast Railway Timetable that said, under certain asterisked stations, Calls on request. Passengers wishing to alight must inform the guard, and those wishing to join must give a hand signal to the driver.

  I decided on Llandanwg. I told the guard I wished to alight there. We continued along the coast, passing four or five tiny platforms, and then the train stopped at Llandanwg, for me alone. Llandanwg was lovely, which was why it was full of
ugly caravans. I walked to Harlech.

  Welsh mountains looked like mountains, and its cottages like cottages, and its castles like castles. Harlech Castle was the very image of the gray mass of round towers high on a sea cliff that children dream about after a bedtime story of kings and princesses and dragons. But I kept my vow against entering castles or cathedrals, and instead walked through the Royal St. Davids golf course to the dunes and examined the caravans and tents. I did not really hate them. I was fascinated by them, as I had been by the shallys on the English coast. I made notes about the furnishings (camp cots, folding tables, transistor radios playing loud music) and about the food (tea, cookies, soup, bread, beans). The people in these encampments were great readers of the gutter press—lots of cheap newspapers were in evidence.

  Tony Henshaw had been a policeman in Liverpool for five years—Constable Henshaw, people called him—and he had thought of making a career of it. "But last year finished it for me," he said.

  He was rather cautious with me at first. He claimed that being a policeman in Liverpool was like anything else. But I knew it was not—or else why had he come to Harlech in his caravan, intending to spend the rest of his life here, and him not even being Welsh?

  "It's rather a foony business," Mr. Henshaw said, looking around policeman's fashion, no sudden movements.

  "Funny in what way?" I asked.

  "I was in Toxteth last soomer."

  "You mean the riots?"

  "Riots and fighting, like. It woosn't easy. They was kids everywhere in the streets. Everywhere you looked, kids. All of them fighting. The fighting was bad. It was very bad." He became silent.

  I stared and waited, expecting more.

  "I can tell you I was scared."

  I said in a patronizing way, "That's nothing to be ashamed of. You could have been killed."

  "I could have been killed," he said gratefully.

  Then he said, "You actually feel sorry for soom of them. They have no chance, no chance at all. It's 'awpless, really. The kids, small kids, all in tatters. It's sad."

  "So you quit?"

  "I was dead scared," he said. "But the situation hasn't changed. I think of them sometimes—all in tatters."

  ***

  The next day, without thinking. I walked out of Harlech, past the castle, and down the road to Tygwyn. It was about a mile. And then I remembered the train; but now I could see whether flagging it down—giving a hand signal, as the timetable said—actually worked. I waited, and at about ten-thirty I heard the train whistle. I stuck my hand out. The train stopped for me. I got on and rode up the coast. It was the 10:32 to Criccieth.

  We came to a long tidal estuary, and I saw across the water a dome, a church spire, a campanile, some pink and blue cottages, and some fake ruins: Portmeirion. It was a fantasy village, a large expensive folly, built by Sir Clough Williams-Ellis (1883–1978), a Welsh architect. Inspired by Portofino and liking this part of the Welsh coast, he created this village from scratch—the colors and shapes were not at all Welsh, and it looked unusual even from two miles away on a moving train. But it was a steamy day, and soon Portmeirion disappeared into the heat haze.

  In Penrhyndeudraeth, the next stop, there was a large explosives factory. The local people called it Cooks, after the former owners, but its correct name was the Nobel Explosives Factory, a horrible conglomeration of vats, tubes, metal elbows, and wired-up pipes, arranged on the hillside like an enormous homemade whiskey still, and surrounded by prison fences and barbed wire. The interesting thing to me was not that this ugly explosives factory was in a pretty village, or that this grubby dangerous business gave us the Nobel Peace Prize—it was rather that for fifteen years in that same village of Penrhyndeudraeth, with this dynamite under him, lived Bertrand Russell, the pacifist.

  Eight more miles on this sunny day and we drew into Criccieth, where I hopped out of the train. I owned a guidebook that said, "Criccieth: For several years this small town was the home of James (now Jan) Morris, probably the finest living British travel writer." The "James (now Jan)" needed no explanation, since the story of how she changed from a man to a woman in a clinic in Casablanca was told in her book Conundrum, 1974. She still lived near Criccieth, outside the village of Llanystumdwy, in what was formerly the stables of the manor house, looking northward to the mountains of Eryri and southward to Cardigan Bay.

  I seldom looked people up in foreign countries—I could never believe they really wanted to see me; I had an uncomfortable sense that I was interrupting something intimate—but I did look up Jan Morris. She had written a great deal about Wales, and I was here, and I knew her vaguely. Her house was built like an Inca fort, of large black rocks and heavy beams. She had written, "It is built in the old Welsh way, with rough gigantic stones, piled one upon the other in an almost natural mass, with a white wooden cupola on top. Its architecture is of the variety known these days as 'vernacular,' meaning that no professional architect has ever had a hand in it."

  She was wearing a straw calypso hat tipped back on her bushy hair, and a knit jersey, and white slacks. It was a very hot day and she was dressed for it. There is a certain educated English voice that is both correct and malicious. Jan Morris has such a voice. It was not deep but it was languid, and the maleness that still trembled in it made it sultry and attractive. There was nothing ponderous about her. She shrugged easily and was a good listener, and she laughed as a cat might—full-throated and with a little hiss of pleasure, stiffening her body. She was kind, reckless, and intelligent.

  Her house was very neat and full of books and pictures. "I have filled it with Cymreictod —Welshness." Yes, solid country artifacts and beamed ceilings and a no smoking sign in Welsh—she did not allow smoking in the house. Her library was forty-two feet long and the corresponding room upstairs was her study, with a desk and a stereo.

  Music mattered to her in an unusual way. She once wrote, "Ani-mists believe that the divine is to be found in every living thing, but I go one further; I am an inanimist, holding that even lifeless objects can contain immortal yearnings ... I maintain, for instance, that music can permanently influence a building, so I often leave the record player on when I am out of the house, allowing its themes and melodies to soak themselves into the fabric."

  Perhaps she was serious. Inanimate objects can seem to possess something resembling vitality, or a mood that answers your own. But melodies soaking into wood and stone? "My kitchen adores Mozart," the wise-guy might say, or, "The parlor's into Gladys Knight and the Pips." But I did not say anything; I just listened approvingly.

  "I suppose it's very selfish, only one bedroom," she said.

  But it was the sort of house everyone wanted, on its own, at the edge of a meadow, solid as could be, well-lighted, pretty, painted, cozy, with an enormous library and study and a four-poster: perfect for a solitary person and one cat. Hers was called Solomon.

  Then she said, "Want to see my grave?"

  I said of course and we went down to a cool shaded woods by a riverside. Jan Morris was a nimble walker: she had climbed to twenty thousand feet with the first successful Everest expedition in 1953. Welsh woods were full of small twisted oaks and tangled boughs and moist soil and dark ferny corners. We entered a boggier area of straight green trees and speckled shade.

  "I always think this is very Japanese," she said.

  It did look that way, the idealized bushy landscape of the woodblock print, the little riverside grotto.

  She pointed across the river and said, "That's my grave—right there, that little island."

  It was like a beaver's dam of tree trunks padded all around with moss, and more ferns, and the river slurping and gurgling among boulders.

  "There's where I'm going to be buried—or rather scattered. It's nice, don't you think? Elizabeth's ashes are going to be scattered there, too." Jan Morris was married to Elizabeth before the sex change.

  It seemed odd that someone so young should be thinking of death. She was fifty-six, and the hormo
nes she took made her look a great deal younger—early forties, perhaps. But it was a very Welsh thought, this plan for ashes and a gravesite. It was a nation habituated to ghostliness and sighing and mourning. I was traveling on the Celtic fringe, where they still believed in giants.

  What did I think of her grave? she asked.

  I said the island looked as though it would wash away in a torrent and that her ashes would end up in Cardigan Bay. She laughed and said it did not matter.

  At our first meeting about a year before, in London, she had said suddenly, "I am thinking of taking up a life of crime," and she had mentioned wanting to steal something from Woolworth's. It had not seemed so criminal to me, but over lunch I asked her whether she had done anything about it.

  "If I had taken up a life of crime I would be hardly likely to tell you, Paul!"

  "I was just curious," I said.

  She said, "These knives and forks. I stole them from Pan-American Airways. I told the stewardess I was stealing them. She said she didn't care."

  They were the sort of knives and forks you get on an airplane with your little plastic tray of soggy meat and gravy.

  Talk of crime led us to talk of arson by Welsh nationalists. I asked why only cottages were burned, when there were many tin caravans on the coast that would make a useful blaze. She said her son was very pro-Welsh and patriotic and would probably consider that.

  I said that the Welsh seemed like one family.

  "Oh, yes, that's what my son says. He thinks as long as he is in Wales he's safe. He'll always be taken care of. He can go to any house and he will be taken in and fed and given a place to sleep."

  "Like the travelers in Arabia who walk up to a Bedouin's tent and say, 'I am a guest of God' in order to get hospitality. Ana dheef Allah."

  "Yes," she said. "It's probably true—it is like a family here in Wales."