The painters brightened Hastings, and it seemed to me full of energy and industry and good humor, just the sort of place to recommend to a sensitive friend or relation with an artistic bent. All this and salubrious air, from Cliff End to Bulverhythe!
I was eating two pigeons in a restaurant with Rooney and praising the town one night, when at the mention of a person I had found particularly good-natured, Rooney looked doubtful.
"You may be right," Rooney said, implying that I was completely mistaken.
"Sarah Milverton—that lady you introduced me to—she seemed just the sort of secure fulfilled person—"
"Don't," Rooney said. "Her husband died a week ago. Cancer. And he'd been manic for eight years."
"How manic?"
"Doing his nut—that's how manic. He heard voices for eight years. That's a lot of voices. Sarah's had a terrible time."
I said, "What about that guy telling the jokes—Orlock?"
He said, "You noticed no one laughed at the jokes?"
This was true, and now that I thought of it, Orlock had seemed a trifle frenzied in his joke-telling. But it had been a drunken meal, confirming my impression of Hastings as an artists' colony full of optimistic romance and spirited intimacy.
"You noticed his bandage?"
No, I had not seen Orlock's bandage.
"It was on his arm—his whole arm. Seventeen stitches," Rooney said. He looked at me as though at a child, pitying my innocence, smiling despairingly at what he had to tell me, regretting that the subject had come up. "Orlock tried to kill himself this morning with a razor."
But I still liked Hastings, and I would have stayed longer, except that I had as yet seen very little of the British coast. There was so much of it ahead of me that I sometimes had the urge to cut and run—simply get on an express train and make a dash for Wales, or fly to Scotland and forget Ulster. But I had vowed to make my way slowly around the whole coast, and so one rainy morning Rooney walked east with me along the Promenade.
If Hastings had been richer, all these Victorian buildings would have been torn down. The town was too poor to be vulgar, and it had enough friendly artists to avoid being philistine. And was I right in thinking that painters liked being near the sea—something to do with the light? Rooney thought there might be something in this. Painters and fishermen seemed to go together. At the fish market in Hastings, Rooney said, you could find fish that you wouldn't see anywhere else in Britain—squid, octopus, and cuttlefish. And the sole was the best in the country. At the tall Scandinavian-looking net sheds, made out of black planks, the fishermen sat with basins of fish, mending nets, saying very little. Rooney said they were impenetrable men and had their own customs. For example, if they saw a priest or nun in the early morning, they would not go out fishing that day.
"You can imagine what they'd do if they saw the Pope!" he said.
As a matter of fact, the Pope was expected in Britain within a month, the first papal visit ever.
At Queen Victoria's statue in Warrior Square, where Hastings flattened into St. Leonards-on-Sea, Rooney said, "This is as far as I go. It's all geriatrics from here to Land's End!"
St. Leonards was dull and colorless, full of low, forbidding houses in which plants with dusty leaves were arranged in waist-high windows. It began to rain hard, and though St. Leonards was slightly improved by the blur of the downpour, I did not linger there, but instead took the coastal train two stops to Bexhill-on-Sea. When I got to Bexhill I realized that St. Leonards had been seedy.
"Like all the larger English watering-places, it is simply a little London super mare." What Henry James wrote of Hastings and St. Leonards was truer now of Bexhill-on-Sea. "With their long, warm seafront and their multitude of small cheap comforts and conveniences, [they] offer a kind of résumé of middle-class English civilization and of advantages of which it would ill become an American to make light."
A résumé of middle-class English civilization was a High Street lined with shops selling sensible practical merchandise—plain food and brown clothes; not many restaurants but plenty of tea shops; a busy bus route; semidetached houses, with hedges and pebbledash façades; a park bench every twenty yards; a bowling green; a severe seafront—no fun fair visible, and few public houses; and a large elderly population of shuffling Tories.
And there was the De La Warr Pavilion, where, on the various decks and verandas, the very old people sat in chairs with blankets in their laps staring out to sea, like people on a cruise, resting between meals. They drank tea, rattling their china cups on trembling saucers. They read the latest Falklands news without blinking: they had been through two world wars and may well have been in this very place when Adolf Hitler stood gloating at them through binoculars from the heights of the French coast.
If Bexhill-on-Sea was a résumé of one English class, the De La Warr Pavilion—moored there on the seafront like an ocean liner—was a résumé of Bexhill-on-Sea. Its lounges smelled of sickness and liniment, it echoed with lilting organ music, its tea-drinkers looked anguished; and yet it was a good warm place where I could sit comfortably (I rented a deck chair) and write up the diary I had neglected since before Hastings. I bought a cup of tea, like the others, and a chocolate biscuit; I stared at the sea and, writing my diary, I felt eighty years old but very safe and dry. It seemed clear to me that once an English person had reached Bexhill-on-Sea, he had no intention of going any farther. This was, so to speak, the edge of the cliff. That was why the town was filled with dull comforts and warm rooms and large windows and busy churches. No one raised his voice here. There was no need. It was a monotonous drone of voices, an unvarying buzz of sibilant whispers. Nothing was urgent. People came here and admitted they were old and spent the rest of their lives looking after each other. On the English coast, the geriatric communities like Bexhill were almost Utopian in the way the oldies cooperated in the struggle against aging.
Far from making light of Bexhill, as Henry James feared Americans might be prone to do in a watering place of this kind, I felt I was taking it too seriously. I wandered around the Pavilion and saw that there was an entertainment every day—a show, a band concert, a ballet, or an exhibition. That day there was an Antiques Fair, and that night the East Sussex Keep Fit Rally, and the next day the Sussex Opera and Ballet Society Weekend. And I had just missed the Warbleton and Buxted Band on the De La Warr Terrace ("deckchairs 30 pence").
I struck up a conversation with one Albert Crapstone, a deaf retired gent who had come here from Tunbridge Wells to die. He had a Daily Express on his lap, full of Falklands action. We talked about this, and then he said, "You're a Yank," and stiffened.
"And you came in, late as usual," he said, meaning that the United States had just announced her support for Britain in the military action against Argentina. "Just like the Great War, and the Second World War. At the last possible moment! Typical!"
He leaned forward, crumpling his newspaper.
"You can go back and tell your President we don't need his bloody help," Mr. Crapstone said.
"Fine," I said, because a man with a hearing aid always has a tactical advantage in an argument—and what was the point? "I'll tell him the next time I see him. I think he's over at Cooden Beach having a swim."