Mr. Dunball wanted to know what I thought of London.
I told him that I thought London was more like a country than a city. It was a sort of independent republic.
"I was in London once!" Mr. Dunball said. "It was before the war. Simpson's Hotel in the Caledonian Road, four-and-sixpence bed and breakfast. The doorknob, see, was in the middle of the door, and you pushed it and walked downstairs to the parlor. I was down there attending a course at Houndsditch Technical College. But it didn't do me a bit of good. I always wanted to go down for a Cup Final, but I never did. I just went that one time. I'll never forget it."
We skirted the Wolds—they looked like low rolls of fog in the distance—and then we traveled through the spinach fields of Lincolnshire. It was an area of great flatness, land like sea, and a wide sky of white vacant light. There was something about this even landscape and the four-square farmhouses and the geometry of the fields that hinted at moral probity and Bible-reading and rectitude. It was clear in the angles of the hedges and all the way to the straight, ruled horizon. The highest object in the landscape was the church spire, and this solitary pencil point was a kind of sanctifying emphasis that could be seen ten miles away. But it was all illusion, like the apparent disorder that made jungles seem savage to missionaries. And yet it was true that people who lived in sight of a flat horizon tended to build square houses.
At North Somercotes we passed Locksley Hall. I should have known it from the way it overlooked the sandy tracts and the long hollow ocean ridges.
O the dreary, dreary moorland! O the barren shore!
But was it really better, as the poem said, to have "fifty years of Europe than a cycle of Cathay"? It did not seem so in Mablethorpe, a flat, sad place modeled on a holiday camp and thronged with shivering vacationers. It was cold, but that was not the reason these people were scowling. This was the coast of last resorts. In other years these people had had their fish and chips in Spain, but there was less work now, and all their dole money got them this year was this place and Mumby and Hogsthorpe and Sutton-on-Sea. It was a dole holiday, a cheapie, and no more fun than a day out from the prison farm, some enforced fresh air, and then back to the classified ads and the Job Centre.
The caravan sites with their acres of tin boxes—whole caravan towns, in fact, tucked behind the duney shore—rivaled those I had seen on the coast of Wales. This was also a sort of miners' Riviera, for as we neared Skegness we passed holiday camp hotels. They had the look of painted prisons: the Nottinghamshire Miners' Holiday Home and the Derbyshire Miners' Holiday Centre and the huge wind-whipped Eastgate Holiday Centre at Ingoldmells. Fourteen applicants had expressed an eagerness to enter Eastgate's Miss Topless Competition—a tit show for amateurs—but the odd thing was that there were not enough vacationers to watch it, so the date had been pushed ahead to late August.
And then Skeggy itself—it deserved its ragged-sounding nickname. It was a low, loud, faded seaside resort. It was utterly joyless. Its vulgarity was uninteresting. It was painfully ugly. It made the English seem dangerous. And, at last, it made me want to leave—to take long strides down its broad sands and walk all the way to Friskney Flats. But there was no walking here—too muddy, too many of the canals and ditches they called "drains" here, and no path. There was no train, so I took a bus, or rather several of them, along the silty shore of the Wash, getting off at Butterwick and walking to Boston.
Boston's church—the Stump, they called it—was so tall and the land around it so flat that I was able to see it for a whole afternoon as I rode and walked toward it. From a distance it looked like a water tower, and closer like a gray stone lantern, and in Boston itself it resembled a stone crown on a pillar. This corner of the Wash was all a landscape of ancient churches separated by flat fields. I could not see the shore until I was on top of it, and it was impossible to walk there without getting wet feet. It was like the Netherlands—that white Dutch daylight and hard-packed sand and measured fields and plain old houses set in Calvinist clumps, with miles of vegetables between. The landscape was austere, but the place names were fantastic: Fishtoft, Breast Sand, Whaplode, Pode Hole, and Quadring Eudike; and a very ordinary street would have a name like Belchmire Lane. But it was so flat, you could see a mature poplar tree ten miles away.
***
After more than a week of the railway strike, the management of British Rail said that they were breaking it. They said the drivers were showing up. They said the railways were being manned in a modest way. They said that all over the country people were traveling to work on trains—10 percent of the trains were running.
London news had always sounded a little strange when I heard it in places like Enniskillen, Mallaig, Porlock, or Grimsby. Now in King's Lynn it was perplexing to read of these running trains. There was none running in King's Lynn. The station was empty. It was another lie, like "Rail-stricken Britain rolls on." No one I saw was going anywhere.
King's Lynn was dignified and dull, its stately center so finely preserved, it looked embalmed; and grafted to it was a shopping precinct. This rabbit warren was all discount stores and boutiques and hamburger joints; it would not have seemed out of place in Hyannis, Massachusetts, though it was a little too vulgar for Osterville. King's Lynn's Skinheads and motorcyclists were particularly boisterous—these gangs seemed to me as much a part of the fine old market towns in provincial England as the period houses and the graceful windows, and they seemed especially to enjoy roaring down quaint cobblestone streets on their Japanese motorbikes. They called the bikes "hogs" in their gentle rustic accents.
But King's Lynn was a habitable place and patchily pretty, and it had hopes. The King's Lynn Festival would be starting soon. The brochures promised eight concerts, five orchestras, a jazz band, several plays, poetry readings, numerous movies, and puppet shows. And although it was some miles from the coast—if the Wash could be called the coast—it had the air of a seaport, and the same Dutchness I had sensed in Lincolnshire.
Five railway lines had met at King's Lynn, where there was now one—and it was strike-bound. It was marshy along the shore to Hunstanton. So I took the bus to the top of the Norfolk coast, Wells-next-the-Sea. It was such a tame landscape of meadows and thin woods that it looked like Wimbledon Common for forty miles. Wells and its neighbor, Stiffkey, were famous for their cockles. I walked at the edge of the salt marsh and had some cockles for lunch. They were salty and had the texture of lumps of underdone pasta. Stiffkey had once had a rector at its church who had scandalized—"thrilled" was probably a more apt word—English society by trying to reform prostitutes. I stopped at a public house in Stiffkey to ask about this notorious clergyman, but before I could introduce the subject, the barman (Fred Watmough) began talking about trains. He said there was one at Weybourne that ran to Sheringham, and it was running.
"What about the strike?"
Mr. Watmough said, "This is a private line. They call it 'the Poppy Line.' Very pretty."
I walked to Weybourne, almost ten miles. But Weybourne was no more than a hamlet—flinty cottages, a square-towered church, and a lovely windmill. A small sign said north Norfolk railway and pointed up a country lane. That was another mile, between pines and pastures, and then Weybourne Station.
"The last train—the last proper train—left here in 1964, traveling from Melton Constable to Great Yarmouth," Mr. Winch said. Mr. Winch was a volunteer on the North Norfolk Railway. "And now Melton Constable is just a little village in the middle of nowhere."
"And if you said you wanted to take the train to Great Yarmouth, people would probably laugh," I said.
"In actual fact," Mr. Winch said, "you can't get there from here."