On the way to Leven we stopped at Largo. "Alexander Selkirk, the original of Robinson Crusoe, was born here in 1676." There was a statue of Selkirk in front of his birthplace, a cottage in Lower Largo.
"Its proper name is the Seatoun of Largo," a man next to me said. He had just boarded the bus, and we began talking about Largo and Selkirk. The man said, "Alexander Selkirk was a rogue! He was no good at all!"
I said that I had read somewhere that Selkirk had once kicked his mother and father downstairs.
"Aye, a rogue," the man said. "And I'm a direct descendant of his, on my mother's side of the family."
The man's name was David Gillis. He was ninety years old. It seemed my fate to be quite often encountering very old men. But it was these buses and trains — the old men didn't drive, didn't own cars, and I ran into them traveling. I was glad of it. David Gillis was bright-eyed and his hearing was fine. He could have been seventy or so. He was going to Leven to do a little shopping.
I was always interested to know what work these people had done. What had Gillis done seventy-five years ago, at the age of fifteen?
"I was apprenticed to a plumber in Largo and earned half a crown a week" — about twenty cents. "But it wasn't just plumbing I had to learn — all plumbers were tinsmiths and bell-hangers. I got my first job in 1906. I was offered a pound a week by a man in Largo, but I turned it down. I went to Glasgow and got two pounds. You see, the country employers used to take advantage of us."
He stayed in Glasgow for some years and eventually went to London, where his skills were in demand.
"Nowadays, plumbing is easy. You put in the pipes and the pump does all the work. But in those days we didn't have pumps. That made it very tricky work, because the flow had to be just right. And bell-hanging was a delicate thing. There was a bell in every room in the big houses. They worked on wires — no electrics at all. Bing went the bell and it would register on a panel downstairs, where the servants were. Bell-hanging was quite an art. No one does it now."
In 1941, Mr. Gillis' doctor in London said, "If you want your wife to live, you'll get her out of here." Her nerves were bad, and German bombs were tearing into the city. People asked him why he had come back to Largo, but he always said that if they spent two nights together in London with those bombs, they wouldn't ask.
In the mid-sixties the railway to Largo closed. It was the worst thing that had ever happened in this part of Fife. The end of the railway was the end of the village.
"It was a terrible thing," Mr. Gillis said. "Now we're twelve miles from a railway station, and the bus is awful. Some days it doesn't come at all. And it's getting worse. If I miss the bus, I have to wait hours in Leven. And there's nothing to do there — Leven is more dead than alive."
There had been a railway through Largo and all the way to Crail and St. Andrews, Mr. Gillis said. The buses had not replaced it, and who had the money to run a car?
Mr. Gillis, at ninety, was surprised at how slow and difficult it was for anyone to get from place to place these days. Years ago it had been very easy.
He confirmed my feeling that great parts of Britain were turning into what they were before the railway age. Villages were becoming crabbed and shrunken, and businesses were closing, and the people who stayed in rural areas became more and more tied to their houses. The urban areas were growing in population and becoming poorer, like Leven, the last stop. Areas of high unemployment like this had a distinctively sooty look and woeful air — not much traffic but plenty of people on the sidewalks. In these poor towns the people walked rather slowly.
In a report on Kirkcaldy, eight miles farther along the coast, half the sample of unemployed people described "wandering along the High Street" as a regular activity. They did not leave Kirkcaldy ("birthplace of Adam Smith, author of The Wealth of Nations"), because bus fares were too high. They could not afford to look for jobs elsewhere. I had bought a copy of this report. It was called Biding Time and subtitled "Reflections of unemployed young people in Kirkcaldy, 1982." Reflections was the wrong word. They were not particularly alarmed by the lack of work available. Unemployment was so common, there was no stigma attached to it; it was accepted as a permanent condition. The report noted that few of the young people expressed a "desperate willingness to do 'anything.'" There was always the dole and, for pleasure, the High Street to wander along. And while several were angry at their inability to find jobs, others had their own solutions: "One person was thinking about emigrating; one expected a prison sentence soon…"
I had passed East and West Wemyss ("so called because of the numerous large 'weems' or caves… along this coast") and some defunct coal fields. I would have stayed in Kirkcaldy if it had seemed a desperate place, but it was more dull than desperate. I made a tour of the town and then continued past the small windy resort at Burnt-island and along canyons of junk and discarded cars near the cliffs at Inverkeithing. But this junkyard was also part of the embankment of the Firth of Forth, and if you turned your back on this ramshackle shore, which was like a mortal wound in Scotland's side, there was a grand view of ships and water and the Forth Bridge.
Edinburgh was the next stop, but it was not on my coastal itinerary. It was, in atmosphere, an inland city, and now that the port of Leith was moribund, it hardly counted as important to shipping. But it was a handsome place still, a city of black crags and old solemn tenements of slate rising to a castle that looked like a dark drum on a cliff. Wind gusted up its steep alleys. What was now grass and railway tracks in a ravine beside Princes Street had once been a loch. It was the most beautiful city in Britain and one of the must-beautiful in Europe. It looked as if it were the setting of great intrigues and passionate vice, but I knew it to be a quiet indoor city inhabited by private souls who lived in narrow seclusion.
In Edinburgh I was told that a railway strike was looming and that in three or four days there would not be a single train running in Britain. This event was not viewed with much passion by the general public. The sort of punishing strike that created misery in other countries was met in Britain with either excitement — a kind of community thrill at the drama of it — or else indifference. The British were fatalistic; it was the origin of their cynicism, but it also made them good sharers of misfortune. "Oh, well, mustn't grumble!"
I hurried to North Berwick, which lay on a corner of land between the Firth of Forth and the North Sea, and from here I walked to Dunbar, spending a whole day making detours. I had seen Dunbar from the train as it sped by, and I had liked the look of it, so I took this chance to stop there. The harbor was on a bleak and rocky bay, faced by rotting ramparts and collapsing red stone walls. The old buildings in Dunbar were also made of this red stone and the High Street was fifty yards wide. But it was a lifeless place and a little sad on this cold day in July. I debated whether to stay the night or head for the border. On these long summer evenings there was always plenty of time to decide.
I was reluctant to leave Scotland — I had liked nearly everyone I had met. But then in Dunbar I met a loudmouth named Billy Crombie. He was traveling south and had stopped to drink three pints of beer. He was a Glaswegian, with a mustache as large as a ferret and a cowering wife. His face was purple; he drove a Jaguar.
"I'm going to a foreign country!" he declared. "Aye, England — it's a foreign land! Scotland's ruled by the bloody English. They dropped Exchange Control so that they could spend our money abroad — they don't spend it in Scotland, though they stole it from us in the first place by stealing our oil resairves. And you bloody Yanks have atomic bombs a few miles from Glasgow, and nuclear subs in Holy Loch! Why don't you put them in London, that's what I want to know. Don't mention politicians. They're beyond a joke. David Steel is a Unionist! Tam Dalyell is a carpetbagger! Jenkins is a Tory — it was an Orange seat and they ran a Catholic to oppose him — how could he lose? I'm a freedom fighter — don't let these tweeds fool you. You can ask my wife, if you don't believe I'm a freedom fighter. Now, listen, go home and tell them we don't want your bombs!"