The Smallbones glanced at my pen. They were very annoyed — they were decent people, but even decent people could not find work these days. They were law-abiding — masses of people never bothered to buy a TV license and didn't give a tinker's curse when the television-detector van parked in Mostyn Close and trained its radar on the flats, fully aware that people inside the flats were watching "Championship Darts" or "The Dukes of Hazzard" without a license. And the Smallbones respected public property: they hated graffiti, and these on the wall of the bus shelter had been written by perverts, lunatics, and fanatics. Sometimes it made them ashamed to be Welsh. Sometimes they felt like just jacking it in and going to Nova Scotia like the Davises, but that was years ago, and who wanted to hire a man with a bad back?
Ten minutes passed. The bus did not come. I waited a few more minutes and then decided to walk. The Smallbones were still waiting, and after I had gone they examined the walls of the bus shelter, trying to determine which scribbles were mine.
I returned to Llandudno Junction for the third time and then to Llandudno. Now I noticed that there were seagulls on the platform of Llandudno Station, thirty or forty of them, waiting the way pigeons waited at Waterloo.
At last I decided to leave Wales. I took another train to Llandudno Junction. Today was Friday, and the train was full of people returning to their homes in industrial Lancashire and West Yorkshire. Some had been farther afield than Rhos-on-Sea and Colwyn Bay.
"The people crowded round us," Janet Hosegood said. She was a librarian in Runcorn. She loved to travel. She had spent last year's Easter vacation on a group tour of three Chinese cities, Canton, Suchow, and Shanghai, as she was telling old Mr. Bolus, who had never been east of Mablethorpe.
Mr. Bolus said, "Ee?"
"They'd never seen eyes like ours," Miss Hosegood said. She was fifty-one and loved country walks. Spinster, she wrote when marital status was asked for. She hated the abbreviation "Ms." — "Miss!" she usually said, showing her teeth.
Mr. Bolus said, "Ee?"
"In Channah," Miss Hosegood said.
"Ee?"
"People's Repooblic," Miss Hosegood said.
"Aye," Mr. Bolus said.
"'cause their eyes are slanty-like," Miss Hosegood said.
"Aye," Mr. Bolus said.
"Six 'oondred and fifty pound it cost us, all in," Miss Hosegood said.
But Mr. Bolus had been distracted from this talk of China by the bulldozers outside Colwyn Bay, preparing to build something. It can only be something awful, he thought, for here there was mile after mile of shallys and villas and caravans and tents, facing the Irish Sea.
At last Mr. Bolus looked away and said, "Ee?"
Although it was a pleasant, rattly two-car train, it was rather full of people and belongings. But what was especially annoying to the others was the appearance of Roland Painter-Betty and his dog, Ollie, the pair of them pushing down the aisle and then taking the only empty seat — seats, rather, because Roland snagged the window and the dirty great Alsatian leaped onto the seat next to him.
"Wonder if he paid full fare?" a man named Garside muttered.
Janet Hosegood said, "That dog should be on the flipping floor."
And they also hated the sight of Roland Painter-Betty's earring and chunky bracelet and Liberty scarf and the kind of puce-colored shoes no normal man would wear.
It was all caravans here, from Abergele east, places with names like Golden Sands, just tin boxes, miles of them, on flat stretches of sand — no trees.
We crossed the River Clwyd and came to Rhyl, which was stained with soot and looked punished. Its fun fair and amusement park were silent, and it looked truly terrible.
Verna and Doreen, neighbors from Wallasey, had turned away from Rhyl. This was the last day of their holiday and they didn't want it spoiled — Verna explained that the sight of grotty places could leave a bad taste in your mouth. They talked about a mutual friend, Rose, who had recently moved into Stanley Road.
"How's she getting on, then?" Verna asked.
"Talks to everyone. She's got a word for everyone," Doreen said.
"She's a Londoner."
"Well, this is it, isn't it. Your Londoners are a very outgoing people, aren't they."
Some of the caravans were on marshland, sinking badly, some of them broken-backed on Morfa Rhuddlan ("where in 759 the Welsh under Caradoc were routed by Offa of Mercia").
No one said a word to Roland Painter-Betty or to Ollie, stinking and slavering on the seat next to him. Everyone knew Roland was getting away with murder. But strangers were not addressed on British trains: they might be maniacs, they might be rude, or, worse, they might come from the class above you. If it was certain the stranger was a foreigner, then it was just possible someone would say, "I wish you wouldn't do that." But Roland was a native, and probably a poofter, and they could be so touchy — worse than women, some of them.
We stopped and everyone looked out the windows: Prestatyn. It was red brick, once important to the lead industry, then a holiday resort that had never quite caught on. COME TO SUNNY PRESTATYN, posters said, mocking the bleak place. The tide was down and sand mounted toward the shore, forming banks and low dunes. Behind Prestatyn lay the empty green hills of Denbighshire.
The River Dee was hopeless with sand — seven miles wide at this point but scarcely navigable, as the brown bubbly flats of the Mostyn Bank seemed to prove. And the land was flat, too; the sheep had cropped it so closely and so evenly, it looked like the surface of stagnant water. The town of Flint had turned its back on the river. It had a sullen wintry look and the British industrial smells of foot rot, dead mice, and old socks. The junkyards outside Shotton were a warning, for Shotton's steelworks were shortly to close and become junkyards, leaving thousands without jobs.
The sky was yellow-gray, like a certain kind of smoke. It was June, and in the immense torpor of the steaming day the passengers had begun to doze off, only one person acknowledging the fact that, just a mile from Chester, we crossed the Welsh border. Mr. Bolus said it had been the Welsh border for a thousand years.
Janet Hosegood was talking, still telling Mr. Bolus — he was deaf, I had now decided — about the People's Republic of China, her last year's holiday.
13. The 16:01 to Southport
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.
I was in New Brighton ("Here Sibelius's music, conducted by the composer, was first publicly heard in England"), strolling past the green-haired punks and the Rockers, who carried booming transistor radios as big as suitcases, and listening to the pop group Raw Sewage howl their hit, "Kick It to Death." I had skipped Chester, considering it too far inland for my coastal purposes, and I had taken a train to Birkenhead.