Was Sylhet severe and monotonous like this? Perhaps so. In any case, Indians had often told me how Cheltenham reminded them of certain towns in the Punjab, and Scotland was reminiscent of Simla, and after the Sultan of Zanzibar was overthrown he took himself to Eastbourne, claiming that it somewhat resembled his fragrant but decrepit sultanate in the Indian Ocean.
I stayed on the train and crossed the Menai Strait to Anglesey. The island was flat, as if it had detached itself from the mainland and become waterlogged. Its meadows were no more than gentle swells, and small houses and broken cottages lay scattered at great distances. It possessed the haunted look that Cornwall had, its rocks like ruins, its stillness like suspense. It had been the Druids' last outpost, and it looked it. In such a flat grassy place it was possible to see that there was nothing threatening, and yet this apparent openness was itself eerie and suggested invisible dangers. It was the sound of the wind, the pale light, the flat shadows on the low ground.
The first station was the famous but unsayable Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch ("St. Mary's Church in a hollow by the white hazel close to the rapid whirlpool by the red cave of St. Tysilio"). It is usually called Llanfair P.G., but the full name appeared on the station signboard, which was fifteen feet long. There was nothing else of interest at the station or in the town, and indeed it was indistinguishable from the other twenty-two places called Llanfair (St. Mary's) in Wales. I was told that the long name had been concocted by the village tailor a century ago so that the place would seem singular, much as Cross Keys, Pennsylvania, had been officially renamed Intercourse.
The stations and villages along the route to Holyhead looked worn down and depressing. It was as if all the millions of lonely Irish people who traveled this way — this was the principal route to Ireland — had devoured the landscape with their eyes, looked upon it with such hunger that there was little of it left to take hold of and examine. It sometimes seemed that way to me in Britain, in the busiest places, as if a castle's ramparts or a hillside or a village — supposedly so picturesque — had been eroded by two thousand years of admiring scrutiny, the penetration of people's eyes. No wonder they now stood on the shore and looked out to sea.
Bodorgan Station was empty, and nearby was an empty hotel; Ty Croes was one ruined cottage; and then the land grew stonier and harsher and looked the sort of place where only Druids could be happy — wind-flattened grass and pitted rocks, a few throaty crows and flocks of barking seagulls.
After the village of Valley there was a causeway to Holy Island. We passed a large factory, Anglesey Aluminium, and slowed as we approached the town of Holyhead.
Holyhead was one of a number of British towns that seemed to be dying — blackening like an extremity with gangrene. It was too far, too barren, too still. It had gone to sleep and would die without waking. The ferry business — boats to the Irish port of Dun Laoghaire — was so bad, they were advertising free liters of whiskey for anyone who made the trip. But the ferries remained empty: no one had any money here. In Anglesey, where the local accent was not Welsh but rather a jaw-twisting Birmingham neigh, I was told that the unemployment rate was 30 percent. It was a meaningless statistic — most statistics struck me as sounding frivolous and hastily invented — but the fact remained that people in Holyhead were visibly idle. They did not work, nor did they do much else but sit and stare. The tennis courts and football fields were empty, the bowling greens were empty — no sports. There was little drinking, because no one could afford it; no movies.
"I sleep late and watch TV," a man named Gower told me. He had been on the dole for five years and was only thirty-two.
The streets were empty. I walked through the town and felt a sense of despair, because I could not imagine that things would ever improve here. No one I met believed that the future would be any brighter, and a number of them said casually that they had thought of emigrating. Whenever British people spoke of emigration, they mentioned North America first — Europe was just as bad as Britain, they said, and Australia was too far.
The younger ones had some hope. I deliberately sought out youths in Anglesey and asked them what their plans were. One thirteen-year-old told me he wanted to be a plasterer — I guessed that his father was a plasterer, but I was wrong. A fourteen-year-old told me he wanted to join the Royal Navy, and another's ambition was to be a carpenter. They hated school, and perhaps they were right to hate it; what job would school prepare them for? A sixteen-year-old told me that he was about to take an exam, and then he wanted to go to college. What would he study?
"Catering," he said. His name was Brian Craster.
I asked him if he meant cooking — being a chef.
"Yeah," he said in his neighing accent, "it's a two-year course."
"Then you get a job."
"If there's one going. There's not much work around here. Just British Rail or the Tinto factory" — Rio Tinto Zinc ran Anglesey Aluminium—"but they've started to lay people off."
"Do you do any cooking now, Brian?"
"A bit," he said. "I can make cakes. Shepherd's pie and that."
"Where do you want to be a chef?"
"Maybe London. Maybe get a job at the Savoy."
None of the youths I met in Holyhead had ever been to London. Brian Craster wanted to go, but he seemed a little fearful, and that made him sound defiant.
It was all Council flats and uncut grass, barking dogs and broken stone walls. I felt sorry for the children, kicking tin cans, their hands in their pockets and their hair blowing, dreaming of being plasterers.
I walked through most of the western part of Holy Island, around South Stack, and then back to the harbor. In a bus shelter overlooking New Harbour I saw a poem written in black ink.
Now it is 1984.
Knock-knock at your front door
It's the suede denim secret police
They have come for your uncool niece
Come quickly to the camp
You'll look nice as a drawstring lamp
Don't worry — it's only a shower
For your clothes — here's a pretty flower
DIE
on organic poison gas
Serpent's egg already hatched
You will croak you little clown
When you mess with President Brown!
As I stood copying this into my small notebook, a middle-aged couple approached the bus shelter. They were Owen and Esther Smallbone from the Council estate just west of Holyhead. They had a small flat, for which they paid £16 a week. Owen Smallbone had been an accounts clerk at the harbor and had taken a leave of absence for medical reasons — a bad back — but when he recovered sufficiently to return to his job, there was no job, and he had been on the dole ever since — four years. Esther sometimes earned a little money looking after the children of working mothers — the Smallbones had no children of their own — but there was not much child-minding these days, because the mothers were being laid off, weren't they? They were always the first to go. Recently, Owen's back had begun again to bother him, which was why they were taking the bus. They were on the way to the General Post Office on Boston Street to purchase a Television Broadcast Receiving Licence (Including Colour)—"apparatus for wireless telegraphy." They rented a Sony Trinitron eighteen inch for £12 a month. The license for watching it would cost £46.
They were very suspicious of me. I wondered why, and then I saw the reason. I had put my notebook away, but I was still holding my pen. So I had probably written that crazy poem, or if not the poem, then perhaps I had drawn the picture of the penis, or else set down my telephone number with the message Ring Roger for a good time, guys, or — and this was the most likely — I was the one going around Holyhead scribbling FREE WALES and FWA, one of the arsonists. My knapsack told a story.