The longer I lived in London, the more I came to see how much of Englishness was bluff and what wet blankets they could be. You told an Englishman you were planning a trip around Britain and he said, "It sounds about as much fun as chasing a mouse around a pisspot." They could be deeply dismissive and self-critical. "We're awful," they said. "This country is hopeless. We're never prepared for anything. Nothing works properly." But being self-critical in this way was also a tactic for remaining ineffectual. It was surrender.
And when an English person said "we," he did not mean himself—he meant the classes above and below him, the people he thought should be taking decisions, and the people who should be following. "We" meant everyone else.
"Mustn't grumble" was the most English of expressions. English patience was mingled inertia and despair. What was the use? But Americans did nothing but grumble! Americans also boasted. "I do some pretty incredible things" was not an English expression. "I'm fairly keen" was not American. Americans were showoffs—it was part of our innocence—we often fell on our faces; the English seldom showed off, so they seldom looked like fools. The English liked especially to mock the qualities in other people they admitted they didn't have themselves. And sometimes they found us truly maddening. In America you were admired for getting ahead, elbowing forward, rising, pushing in. In England this behavior was hated—it was the way wops acted, it was "Chinese fire drill," it was disorder. But making a quick buck was also a form of queue-jumping, and getting ahead was a form of rudeness: a "bounder" was a person who had moved out of his class. It was not a question of forgiving such things; it was, simply, that they were never forgotten. The English had long merciless memories.
***
There were no blank spaces on the map of Great Britain, the best-known, most fastidiously mapped, and most widely trampled piece of geography on earth. No country was easier to travel in—the British invented public transport. And yet I had seen practically nothing of it. I felt ashamed and ignorant, but when I began to think about traveling around Britain, I became excited—because I knew so little. I wanted to write about it.
Writing about a country in its own language was a great advantage, because in other places one was always interpreting and simplifying. Translation created a muffled obliqueness—one was always seeing the country sideways. But language grew out of the landscape—English out of England—and it seemed logical that the country could be accurately portrayed only in its own language. So what was I waiting for?
The problem was one of perspective: How and where to go to get the best view of the place? It was also a problem in tone; after all, I was an alien.
The British had invented their own solution to travel-writing. They went to places like Gabon and Paraguay and joked about the discomforts, the natives, the weather, the food, the entertainments. It was necessary to be an outsider, which was why they had never written about Britain in this way. But it was a mystery to me why no one had ever come to Britain and written about its discomforts and natives and entertainments and unintelligible dialects. The British, who had devised a kind of envious mockery of other cultures, and who had virtually invented the concept of funny foreigners, had never regarded themselves as fair game for the travel-writer. They did not encourage aliens to observe them closely. They were like a tribe that plundered abroad and were secretive and inhospitable at home. The British did not make me think of Shakespeare but rather of head-hunters—their travel-writing a literary version of head-shrinking that had never been used on them. I was eager to try.
But it was also a problem of itinerary. In a place that was crisscrossed with ant trails, a kingdom of bottlenecks and private property and high fences, my route was a problem, because there were too many routes. To take all the trains would be no more than a mediocre stunt. The buses did not go to enough places. A bicycle was out—too dangerous, too difficult; another stunt. A car was too simple, and anyway I had lived in London long enough to know that driving on English roads was no fun. My route was crucial. It was the most important aspect of travel. In choosing a route, one was choosing a subject. But every mile of Britain had a road through it; there was a track across every field, a footpath in every acre of woods. Perhaps this was why I had never traveled in Britain: I had been unable to decide on the route.
And then I had my way: narrowly, around the entire coast.
It answered every need. There was only one coast, it was one undeviating route, and this way I would see the whole of Britain. In many respects, Britain was its coast—nowhere in Britain was more than sixty-five miles from the sea. Nearly the whole of the coast was unknown to me. And so as soon as I decided on this coastal route for my itinerary, I had my justification for the trip—the journey had the right shape; it had logic; it had a beginning and an end; and what better way was there to see an island than circumambulating its coast?
The greatest advantage in this tour was that a country tended to seep to its coast: it was concentrated there, deposited against its beaches like the tidewrack from the sea. People naturally gravitated to the coast, and they wore fewer clothes there—it was normal on the coast to be seminaked, exposed.
The best trains—the slow, sweet branch lines—plied the coast. Many of these branch lines were doomed. Some people said that none would be left in ten years, and most people agreed that the impending railway strike, planned for the early summer, would kill the branch lines. There were also the green buses—I had sometimes seen them filling a country lane, but I had never ridden on one. And there were footpaths.
I had an impression that there was a continuous footpath that went around the whole coastline of Great Britain. Every part of the coast I had seen so far had had such a footpath. Usually it was a muddy twelve-inch path, with a brisk figure approaching in plus fours and thick-soled shoes and a crackling plastic mackintosh, and carrying a bag of sandwiches and an Ordnance Survey Map. I imagined this person to be just another feature of the British coast, like the old gun emplacements and the iron piers and the wooden groynes and the continuous and circling footpath. But if there was not a footpath around the kingdom, there was certainly a beach, and I could walk along the beach—from Fishguard to Aberystwyth, for example, where there was no connecting train. I would try to walk as much as possible; I would take trains if they were interesting lines or if the weather was bad; and if I had to, I would take buses. It was so easy to speed through this country, I would have to make strict rules in order to slow myself down.
"England resembles a ship in its shape," Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote in English Traits. He was wrong: books by pious aliens were full of kindnesses of this sort. England, of course, resembles a pig with something on its back. Look at it. It is a hurrying pig; its snout is the southwest in Wales, and its reaching trotters are Cornwall, and its rump is East Anglia. The whole of Britain looks like a witch riding on a pig, and these contours—rump and snout and bonnet, and the scowling face of western Scotland—were my route.
No British journey could be original. Daniel Defoe had done the whole of Britain by road, William Daniell and Richard Ayton had sailed around it, William Cobbett had gone throughout the south of England on horseback, and more recently H. V. Morton and J. B. Priestley had gone in search of England, banging up and down in the thirties and forties. There were Britain-by-train books and Britain-by-bus books and books about cycling around. Some people had walked around Britain and written about it. The most impressive recent hike was that of a man who had walked every inch of the coastline. It was seven thousand miles, but he had been in a hurry. He had done it in ten months and practically walked his legs off—gave himself two severe pressure fractures in his leg bones. I had read his book. The trouble with travel stunts was that the trick was the thing; it was all a form of tightrope-walking, and the performer never took his eyes off his own feet.