But what I wanted to know was what had happened to him after the Orient Express pulled out of Domodossola.
Mrs. Jack said, "He got out at a station. He didn't tell me where. He had left his luggage on the train. Then the train pulled out. He inquired when the next train was, and they told him the time—five o'clock. Only a few hours, he thought. But he had got mixed up. He thought they meant P.M. and they actually meant A.M.—five the next morning. He had a very bad night, and the next day he went to—where was it? Venice? Yes, he collected his luggage"—the paper bags I had left with the controllore —"and eventually got to Istanbul."
So he had made it!
I told Mrs. Jack who I was and how I had met Mr. Duffill.
She said, "Oh, yes, I read your book! My neighbor's son is an avid reader. He told us about it. He said, 'I think you should see this—I think this is our Mr. Duffill.' And then everyone in Barrow read it."
I was eager to know whether Mr. Duffill himself had read it.
"I wanted him to see it," Mrs. Jack said. "I put a copy aside. But when he came over, he wasn't too good. He didn't see it. The next time he came over I forgot about the book. That was the last time, really. He had his stroke and just deteriorated. And he died. So he never saw it—"
Thank God for that, I thought.
What an interesting man that stranger had been! He had seemed frail, elderly, a little crazy and suspicious on the Orient Express. Typical, I had thought. But now I knew how unusual he had been—brave, kind, secretive, resourceful, solitary, brilliant. He had slept and snored in the upper berth of my compartment. I had not known him at all, but the more I found out about him, the more I missed him. It would have been a privilege to know him personally, and yet even in friendship he would never have confirmed what I strongly suspected—that he had almost certainly been a spy.
24. The North Norfolk Railway
AT GRIMSBY I bought a London paper with the headline RAIL-STRICKEN BRITAIN ROLLS ON! But nothing was rolling in Grimsby, not even a train for the three miles to Cleethorpes. Nothing had been rolling in Scarborough, where I had walked, or Hull, where I had wasted a day on a bus that had taken Mexican-style detours. (It was literally true that English country buses sometimes went backward.) Nothing was rolling at alclass="underline" I never saw a train in motion during the long railway strike. The government kept claiming that a number of trains were operating and that the strike (the issue was drivers' work schedules) was halfhearted. London news always seemed shrill and untruthful upcountry, but this situation-normal news was a damned lie in Grimsby and a cruel joke in poor starved Cleethorpes.
On the bus to Cleethorpes, the man in the next seat, Jim Popplewell, explained that he was a carpet-layer. "But when times are bad, people stop buying carpets," he said. He was earning 50 percent less than he had two years ago.
"What do you think of the north?" he asked. He meant here.
"I don't think of this as the north," I said. After all, I had been to Cape Wrath, four hundred miles north of this.
"But this is the north," Mr. Popplewell said. "It's not half bad. Have a look at the Wolds."
"What exactly are the Wolds?"
"Woods," he said. "Some hills. You'll see them as you head towards Lincoln."
I said I would be sticking to the coast.
"Mablethorpe," he said. "Skeggy."
"That kind of thing," I said.
"I see. You just go from pillar to post."
He said it in a kindly way. I was sure he meant "from place to place." But his statement was nonetheless accurate.
Was Cleethorpes a pillar or a post? It looked a terrible place. I wanted to go away. But how? The only way I could have left was on foot, in the rain, sinking in the mud of the Humber Bank. So I stayed the night in Cleethorpes and watched filthy children playing Tiggy. It was a version of tag. Home was called the Hob. "If we tig the 'ob before 'e gets to the 'ob, we say 'on the 'ob.'" They were twelve-year-olds and a little wary of me. "It's okay," one called to the others, "'e's not a copper!" I must have seemed a little strange to them—all my questions. But I was lonely, I was killing time, I wanted to leave Cleethorpes—to go anywhere. I mentioned Mablethorpe. The salesmen in the hotel laughed at this. Mablethorpe was anywhere.
The salesmen were that dying breed of hustlers that I had first seen on the Kent coast at Littlestone-on-Sea. They talked about places being "shocking." They talked about their territory, calling it "my parish." These gents stopping the night at the Dolphin in Cleethorpes sold everything—brushes, plastic basins, outsized garments, double-glazing. One man told me he went a thousand miles a week in his car and made a hundred and eighty calls. He drove all over Lincolnshire and Yorkshire—automobile spares. A camera salesman told me that the profit on a hundred-quid camera was a fiver for a retailer—hardly worth the effort, since he could make the same profit selling four rolls of film. This man, Jessel by name, said, "We'll all be out of a job in a year or two. My job could be done by a computer. It wouldn't be the same—no human element, see—but it would be cheaper for my company."
The next day I walked back to Grimsby. I asked the way and a lady said, "You must be going to the docks."
Did I look like an able seaman? My coastal traveling had obviously taken its toll on my appearance. I was both flattered and appalled. Here I was, months after leaving Margate, still wearing my leather jacket and my oily shoes and my knapsack, and I suppose I was a little pigeon-toed from walking in a clockwise direction.
There had been stock-car racing and wrestling and bingo at Cleethorpes, but just next door in Grimsby there was the Caxton Theatre and the fish docks and a. sense that this had once been a bustling place and had only recently collapsed. The buildings and high-rise parking lots still stood, but they were empty. A sign at a Grimsby shop selling leathers and furs said, Coneys. I had never seen this old word for rabbit in an advertisement before—and it was also a famous word for "suckers."
The railway station was still shut. Only one bus today was going down the coast—the Ron Appleby coach to Mablethorpe. Well, that was my general direction. There were only five of us on board. I sat down and read the London papers again—more gloating, and what had already begun to be called "the Falklands' spirit." Had these past months produced a national shift of mood? "The travelling public are coping magnificently with the strike ... Many people have found they can do quite well without British Rail," the Tory papers said. More lies. But the truth was pitiable: five dinks bumping down to Mablethorpe. My guess was that most people were coping with the strike by not traveling at all. That was the British way: inaction was a form of coping.
"Not a bad place is Grimsby," an old man in the bus said to me. His name was Sam Dunball and he had worked at the fish docks. He was retired now, and a good thing, too, he said. "The fish is gone and the docks is half-empty. Tt was the Cod War that finished Grimsby. We haven't been the same since. No, there's no fishing industry here anymore."
The so-called Cod War had been a legal dispute over Britain's traditional fishing grounds off the coast of Iceland. A two-hundred-mile fishing limit was declared by Iceland. There was a wrangle, which Britain lost. And the fishing industry in Britain was broken.