I headed south on the train, with his voice still ringing in my ears. Scotland ended at the tiny coastal village of Lamberton, the Northumbrian border, below Lammermuir and the hills of black-faced sheep.
22. The Last Train to Whitby
"IT WUNT RAIN, LAD," Mr. Yeaver the joiner said to me at Berwick-upon-Tweed. "The clouds is too high. The swallows is flying too high."
I had decided to walk to Lindisfarne — Holy Island — at low tide. The Venerable Bede had called it a "semi-isle" twelve hundred years ago. It was still a semi-isle—"accessible at low water, but it is necessary to be acquainted with the quicksands which are dangerous."
Mr. Yeaver said, "I used to work there. I had a joinery. But I lived in Spittal."
That was right across the Tweed. Spittal was an old word for hospital. There were seven Spittals in Britain.
"How did you get out to the island?"
"Pony and trap." It sounded as medieval as the word spittal, but Yeaver was my own age.
He said I could take a bus to a certain public house, and then it was a seven-mile walk. When I started away, he spoke up again.
'They're strange people out there," Mr. Yeaver said. "They're like people with their own different language. And they hate outsiders."
I thanked him for this information and caught the bus to the public house and then walked down a country lane to the shore. I faced an expanse of bubbling mudflats, some of it marked with poles showing the Pilgrims' Way; to the left of this was a narrow causeway. There was a bridge some distance out with a sign on it saying, this bridge is totally submerged at high tide. It was a sunny day, with a light breeze off the North Sea. (Seventy years ago it was called the German Ocean.) I started across the Pilgrims' Way, looking back every so often to see my footprints fill with water. The imprint sank, as if in quicksand, so I made for the causeway. Ahead, Lindisfarne was an island of low straggling dunes, with white houses and red stone ruins at its extreme end. It was banked by sand and it lay in a tide of mud; for half the day it was a village in the sea.
This offshore stroll to the island was one of the most pleasant walks I made on the coast — a memorable mile. The ruins that had been painted by Turner and William Daniell still stood. The sand gleamed. The priory ruins in shadow were silver-black like charcoal, with the same frail sculpted look of burned wood, but where the daylight struck them they were as red and porous as cake. The surface color of the island was the yellow-gray of human skin, and farther off there was a castle wrapped around a solitary high rock. It was exciting to walk across the silty sea bed with nothing but this island in view under a towering sky.
Most offshore islands have an atmosphere of shipboard isolation, with the sea all around. But on Holy Island I felt a sense of being on board a ship that was moored on a long hawser, occasionally drifting to sea and occasionally bumping the shore. The village was small but had a number of cozy hotels. I had no trouble finding a bed or a good meal. I sketched pictures of the strange Lindisfarne boat sheds — the hulls of boats cut crosswise and turned over. They were storehouses, but they looked like beached whales or sea monsters. There was a path just above the high-water mark that went entirely around the island, passing the Links, full of darting rabbits, and carrying on to a sandy promontory called the Snook. It was a restful island and even seemed to have an air of sanctity — something about its flatness and the way the wind murmured softly across the dunes.
The islanders were watchful but not unfriendly. Yet Yeaver had been right on one score. Their accent was incomprehensible to me, a mixture of Scottish and Geordie, with a kind of Gaelic gargle. They did some fishing, but their income was derived from the people who visited the island. They sold postcards and ice cream cones and offered tours of the ruins. Most people raced to the island in cars at low tide, and raced back to the mainland again before the causeway was flooded. Few people stayed the night, though it was a peaceful place to sleep.
***
There was a good view of Holy Island from the train, on the east coast line. It appeared about ten miles south of Berwick, and because it was such a long island, it stayed in view for a number of minutes. More castles and ruins emerged on the low shore of ancient meadows. This part of Northumberland was flat, and today it had a great dome of clouds — an amphitheater with a ceiling of detached cirrus filaments tufting high over a whitish veil of undulant fluff and, below that, decomposing quilts of loose cumulus — this country was cloudland.
I was on the train because the strike was nigh. Soon, people said, there would be no trains. They seemed to like this doomsday drama. They whispered about it at Widdrington and Morpeth ("scanty ruins… and a curious clock-tower"). I had missed Amble-by-the-Sea — which sounded like a book title — and the Scars, but I did not have time to walk today. In any case, the speed of the train intensified the stains on the landscape and showed how quickly grassy pastures vanished into strange industrial cubism — rising chimneys and towers and the steel stick-figures of pylons, which made it almost zoolike, for the wires were crisscrossed against the sky, creating the impression of an enormous cage. This geometric clutter also suggested that we were rushing toward a populous place, and of course we were. It was the beginning of the great sad sprawl of the northeast of England, and even the riverine name of this poor county was like a laborious and demoralized sigh, Tyne and Wear. Newcastle was inland. I made for the coast.
This part of England had the highest rate of unemployment, and today in the sudden shower of rain at Jarrow ("whose name recalls unemployment and the hunger marches of the 20s") it had the poisoned and dispirited look of a place that had just lost a war. It was an area of complex ugliness — not just the dumps full of gulls and crows, and the weak defiance in the faces of the teen-agers I saw at Bolden Colliery; it was also the doomed attempts at survivaclass="underline" the farmer plowing a small strip of field behind an abandoned factory, and the garden allotments of shacks and overgrown enclosures, cabbages and beans, geese and pigs, vegetables and animals alike dusted with fine smut and looking cancerous. It was like a sight of China — black factories and narrow, necessary gardens, and a kind of visible hopelessness. It was one of the dreariest landscapes I had ever seen.
It was hideous and fascinating. We crossed the River Wear, and instead of continuing, I got off at Sunderland in order to verify its desolation. People said business was terrible, the place was dying on its feet. And Sunderland, because it was so depressed, had a dangerous look — the unrepaired buildings and the shabby streets, and the gangs of boys with spiky hair and long ragged coats or leather jackets painted over with fists and swastikas.
A man named Begbie who was a clerk at Binns Department Store said, "Some of the kids who left school six or seven years ago have never had a job. There are jobs in the paper, but these kids stay on the dole. They left school at sixteen and they developed what I call a dole-queue mentality. They're unemployable! They don't want to work, and they've discovered they don't really have to. They learned how to do without it. That's the main difference between the present and other times in British industrial history. We've produced a whole generation of kids who are unemployable!"