There was no one on the beach, no one swimming, no one walking, and no boats; but there was something I had seen before—at Margate, at Broadstairs, at Ramsgate, and Walmer, wherever a road came near the seaside: cars parked and piled up, and people in them, always very old people, the old croak named Rathbone in his toy Morris, and the Witherslacks, Donald and Maureen, both of them sitting in the back seat of their green Cortina, and everyone else. They sat in their cars and stared out at the sea. They were on every beach road. When I walked past, they hardly looked at me—perhaps a glance at the bulge in my knapsack, but not more than that.
If there was a place to park near a beach or a cliff, or any shelf of shore having a clear shot at the sea, the elderly people gathered there, side by side, their tin cars a little tremulous in the wind. I saw them everywhere, eating sandwiches, drinking tea out of plastic cups, reading the paper, looking fuddled. They always faced the water. They were old couples mostly, but they never seemed to be holding conversations. Often the man was asleep, and sometimes the woman was in the back seat and the man in the front ("I've got to have somewhere to put my sandwiches"). They were not bird-watchers or ship-spotters. Indeed, they did not seem to be looking at anything in particular. Their expressions were a little sad and empty, as if they were expecting to see something beyond the horizon or under the surface of the waves.
It looked somber enough to be an English recreation, but I wondered whether it had any other significance. It seemed to me to hold the possibility of the ultimate fright, an experience of nothingness. It was only on the coast where, if you angled yourself properly, you could look at nothing. I never passed these old people in their parked cars—they did not stir from them—without thinking that, in their own way, they were waiting for Godot.
I walked in a high wind and its flying grit to Hythe, where I saw a policeman wheeling his push-bike. I asked him if the little railway was still running down the coast. He said yes and directed me across town. "It's a mile," he said, "a long mile, really."
Down Pulsifier Road and across Albert Street to Saltwood Grove—or names like that—where I asked a lady taking in her wash, "Which way to the station?" And it seemed funny that this was travel, necessitating a knapsack, binoculars, and a knife—and I had a plastic poncho, too! Not here, but sometimes, even on a small suburban road, with a man clipping a hedge and a girl in a school uniform and a whistling mailman, it seemed as foreign and far-off as Gangtok, though often not so safe, since in Sikkim murder is unknown. But it was travel, perhaps in a new sense but in an old place, because I was looking hard at it for the first time and making notes, and because I had no other business there.
The Romney, Hythe, and Dymchurch Railway was one of the narrowest and smallest in Britain, running from Hythe to Dungeness on fifteen-inch tracks. A sign at the station said, NEXT TRAIN AT 17:10, and it was just after five; but the station was locked.
Marjorie Gait at a tea stall nearby said, "That stationmaster is barmy. Sometimes he doesn't open at all. Sometimes he's there at midnight."
But I waited a few more minutes, and the train pulled in, whistling—a steam train, which looked like a toy but had been built to last. A man unlocked the station and beckoned me to the ticket window. I waited there. I was the only traveler.
There was a little placard stuck to the ticket window:
Places of Interest Along the Line—
Dymchurch:
Bingo, small gift shop
New Romney:
Main Railway Station
Greatstone:
Sandy beach
Romney Sands:
Holiday Camp
Lade:
Fish and Chip Shop Public Conveniences
Dungeness:
Lighthouse
Then the shutter went up and I bought a one-way ticket to New Romney from a man with greasy hands—he was the engineer, as well. He seemed a little surprised that it wasn't a round-trip ticket, since this railway was used mainly by joyriders and was kept in business by tourists. The two other passengers that evening were merely returning to New Romney and had come here to Hythe for fun, which was why they had not gotten off the train.
From the dawdling open car, where I sat with my feet up, in the cool empty light that slowed everything it touched this spring evening, I saw sheep and horses, wheatfields with breezes swimming through them, and small houses built close to the ground. At Dymchurch there were yellow fields, one of the pleasures of May in England, the brightest crop: a whole field brimful of vivid gold mustard flowers. And beyond it, on the right-hand side of the tracks, under the lowering haze of a dusty day, ten miles of Romney Marsh. It was a drained marsh, an expanse of flat, fertile pastures. Henry James, who lived just to the southwest, at Rye, wrote that its charms were "revealed best to a slow cyclist," and he listed them: "little lonely farms, red and grey; little mouse-colored churches; little villages that seem made only for long shadows and summer afternoons. Brookland, Old Romney, Ivychurch, Dymchurch—they have positively the prettiest names."
At New Romney, no longer a port, the evening sunlight made the sky slant like a pale lid, so I had time to walk east to the beach and village there, Littlestone-on-Sea. It was no more than some bungalows and a dead tree full of crows and two terraces of old tall houses on a beach where the tide made the pebbles rattle like marbles in a jar. There was no wind—unusual, the hotel manager told me. "The wind never stops." The absence of wind seemed to prolong the daylight, and Littlestone was as calm as a lakefront.
The lady from the front desk, Mrs. Turgis, showed me to my room and hesitated and then sat on my bed and said, "You'll want this switched off," and moved her slender finger against a toggle on the wall. "The intercom," she explained; "when it's on we can hear everything that happens."
"Me talking to myself," I said.
"Or you might have a young lady in here," Mrs. Turgis said.
"Is that likely?" I said.
"And then you wouldn't want anyone to hear," she said, and smiled. She was sitting on my pillow.
All day I had been traveling on sore feet with the sun against my face, marveling at the easy language, the strange shore. But Littlestone-on-Sea was not far from London. Being here—being anywhere in England after dark—was a little like being lost.
Mrs. Turgis stood up quickly, as if she had just remembered something, and went to the door. "If you need anything, just—" and she smiled.
"I sure will"—in those words, because traveling had turned me back into an American.
The hotel was not full—a dozen men, all of them middle-aged and hearty and full of chat, making a remark and then laughing at it too loudly. They had been beating up and down the coast with cases of samples, and business was terrible. You mentioned a town, any town—Dover—and they always said, "Dover's shocking." They had the harsh, kidding manner of traveling salesmen, a clumsy carelessness with the waitresses, a way of making the poor girls nervous, bullying them because they had had no luck with their own wives and daughters.
Mr. Figham, motor spares and car accessories, down from Maid-stone, said the whole of Kent was his "parish"—his territory, shocking place. He was balding and a little boastful and salesman-skittish; he asked for the sweets trolley, and as the pretty waitress stopped, he looked at the way her uniform tightened against her thigh and said, "That chocolate cake tickles my fancy—"