This trackless railway line took me into Scarborough.
***
Scarborough was the most complete seaside resort I had seen so far in Britain. It was a big full-blooded place, three hundred feet up on a part of the coast that was a geological freak. A buckling during the Jurassic period had given Scarborough a Front like a human face—two bays like eye sockets and the bluff between like a great nose of oolite. (It was a fact that people tended to settle those parts of the coast that had huge and recognizably human features—and the settlers even gave those features anatomical names.) Scarborough had theaters and concert halls and department stores; its ledges and steeps were lined with boardinghouses. The town had the same ample contours as its landladies, and the same sense of life in which even platitudes were delivered with gusto. "The biggest fool to a workingman these days is hisself!" The butchers wore straw boaters and blood-stained smocks, and among their sausages and black puddings were braces of pigeons still wearing feathers. On a coast in which one place was turned into a holiday camp and another was declared bankrupt and a third was sliding into the sea, Scarborough seemed, if not eternal, at least busy, prosperous, and alive.
When a British coastal place was modernized, it seemed to strangle on its own novelty. Scarborough had sensibly remained unchanged, and even its entertainments were antique. It was praised for having good theater, notably Alan Ayckbourne's playhouse—Mr. Ayckbourne was a local resident. But live plays were nothing new in a seaside resort—they were as old a virtue as the music halls and the bandstand concerts, and the end-of-the-pier shows.
At the Floral Hall on the clifftop above North Bay I went to see An Evening of Viennese Operetta, put on by the Scarborough Light Opera Society. The English were such brave and unembarrassed amateurs! They loved graceful waltzers, the ladies in ball gowns, the men in tuxedos; perfumed tits, violins, and gliding feet.
"The year is 1850—and Vienna is the city of dreams," John Beagle said as the curtain rose, and the violins swelled under the baton of Gordon Truefitt.
It was "The Blue Danube"! Two pairs of dancers, Maureen Bosomworth and Albert Marston, and the Pobgees—Elizabeth and Malcolm—swept across the floor. Die Fledermaus was next, Eunice Cockburn singing "The Laughing Song." And there was more: Gypsy songs, polkas, more violins. "My Hero," "The Gold and Silver Waltz," "Girls Were Made to Love and Kiss" ("And who am I to interfere with this?") and Maureen Bosomworth changed her gown for every new number. They ran through Franz Lehar, and then we had Sigmund Romberg's "Golden Days" and selections from "The Dancing Years" by Ivor Novello. The hall was full. "You Are My Heart's Delight" brought forth grateful applause, and the selections from Bitter Sweet, especially "I'll See You Again" ("Whenever spring breaks through again") had people wiping tears away.
It was old hat and corny, but it was done with such attention and energy that it was effective. It was the essence of the place itself: Scarborough was a success because it had stayed old-fashioned.
No one swam at such places. "Let's look round the shops," people said. They milled around until four and then treated themselves to "a meat tea." Or they roamed the gardens at the Spa. They chased their children on the sand and encouraged each other to buy ice cream cones, which they called "cornets." They went to the matinées and saw in the flesh their favorite television stars—that fat comedian, that Cockney magician, that man who sang "There'll Always Be an England" so beautifully; the drag artist who did "Mother Goose."
But mostly the seaside resort was tor sitting in the sunshine, reading something really lurid in the gutter press. Today it was the shooting of the Mad Killer. He had been tracked to Malton, only twenty miles away; he was found crouching in a shed near the tennis club; he was heading for the Malton police station—it was going to be part of what the papers called his "murder spree." He was asked to surrender, and when he refused, he was shot as he lay-in the shed.
An elderly clay-pigeon champion had been watching the police close in. This was John Blades. "I just hoped he would go onto the tennis courts," Mr. Blades said. "I could have shot him between the eyes from two hundred yards, and that's just what I wanted to do." Chris Burr was putting milk bottles out when he heard shots. He said, "It was just like the Alamo out there Really frightening. When it was all over, one policeman said to me, 'He had a ton of lead inside him.'"
This I gathered from a Daily Mail handed to me by Phyllis Barmby, who shared a bench overlooking Clarence Gardens. She was glad the Mad Killer had been gunned down. If they had arrested him, he probably would have got a flipping suspended sentence. Ordinarily she didn't believe in capital punishment, but this lad was a nasty piece of work and deserved everything he got. She was not angry. You could tell she was pleased. The Mad Killer business, and its satisfying conclusion, was just the thing for a breezy day on the Front at Scarborough.
Though Yorkshire was always associated, with factories and mines, four fifths of it was open country, and the whole of its coast was countrified. I walked to Osgodby and then to Filey. On the way I passed through some woods and saw a man shouting at a small owl. This was Edgar Overend, a local naturalist. He explained that it was an owlet. "A foolish woman gave it to me to feed. I've been going mad trying to catch mice for it. If she'd left it alone, its mother would have looked after it. But no, she had to meddle! Now the little chap doesn't want to fly away."
The owlet sat on the ground, staring sadly at Edgar Overend.
"Of! you go," Mr. Overend said.
The owlet was uncomprehending. Then it twisted its head upward. A bird had just flown by.
"That's it— you fly," Mr. Overend said. "Shoo!"
The owlet didn't move.
Mr. Overend clapped his hands sharply.
The owlet jumped into the air and made for a treetop.
"At last!" Mr. Overend said. "He'll be all right."
At Filey I saw a holiday camp ahead and hurried to the road. I caught a bus and climbed to the top deck. It was like being in a boat riding the swells of a sea that was running high. I became seasick—nauseated, anyway—and descended to the lower deck. If there hadn't been a railway strike, I could have taken a train from Scarborough. At Bridlington, I took another bus to Flamborough Head, a headland and chalk stack so huge, I had seen it from twenty miles away as I had walked toward Scarborough. This, unfortunately, was one of the Yorkshire sights—a popular outing—so I did not stay, but instead took a bus south to Beverley, all the while cursing the buses.
It was another area of Disused Railway Lines. There was one from Hornsea to Hull, and another back to the coast from Hull to Withernsea. Farther south there had been a train from Louth to Saltfleetby and on to Sutton, Willoughby, and Skegness; and to Spalding and to King's Lynn. And now there were only straight paths in the woods and a dot-dot-dot on the map—sometimes not even that. And if you wanted to get to Catwick, Newbald, Swine, Warter, Sigglesthorne, Great Limber, Rise, Thorngumbald, or Burstwick, you tried to find a bus, but probably you walked.
Trains are different from country to country, but buses are pretty much the same the world over. This was why I stood in a long line of people at the bus shelter—no one knew when the bus was due—and waited for an hour or more on a windy road, and then saw it moving slowly down a road five hills away, and crowded in, and jounced for another hour to go fifteen miles, and I thought: Afghanistan. It was like traveling in a third world country, the sort of country that was always promising that as soon as it achieved a modest prosperity, it would build itself a railway. Buses were slow and sickening and unpredictable, and it was dreadful having to depend on them in Britain. Of course, there were long-distance coaches—but I was not going long distances; and there were city buses—but they were not much good to me. With the rain coming down and the railway strike in full swing, I needed a way of moving down the coast. But there was no reliable way. It took me almost an entire day to get from Bridlington to Hull, where I had a two-hour wait for the next bus out. I would have stayed, but Hull was not on the coast. It was all slow progress, and it got so that the very expression "Take a bus" began to sound as mocking to me as "Fly a kite."