We sat on the platform, watching the poppies tossing in the wind.
Mr. Winch said, "All they'll have left in a few years will be the big intercity routes. King's Lynn won't be on the map. Neither will Cromer or Great Yarmouth or Lowestoft."
"How will people get around?"
He said, "By car. And if they don't drive, they'll live in cities."
"Everyone can't live in the cities," I said.
"Correct," he said. "How's that for a game of soldiers?"
Then he stood up.
"They'll be diddling. Fiddle-faddling," he said. "But they won't get anywhere."
I said, "Buses aren't the answer."
Mr. Winch was looking at the oncoming train. He said, "Buses aren't even a good question. You go to a bus station and ask how to get to Swaffam. And they say, 'Go to Fakenham. You'll probably get a connection there.' They don't even have timetables."
I wanted to say Yes, it's like South America, but I decided not to. And yet Mr. Winch would probably have agreed with me. In a self-critical mood the English could be brutal.
And so I boarded the train. The North Norfolk Railway was a preserved line. It went three miles, to Sheringham, at a donkey trot. People snapped pictures of the engine and smiled admiringly at it. It was the railway buffs who were helping to dismantle British Railways. Their nostalgia was dangerous, since they hankered for the past and were never happier than when they were able to turn an old train into a toy. The commuter who spent two hours a day on the suburban train going to and from his place of work was very seldom a railway buff.
Rosalie and Hugh Mutton collected preserved railways. They had been on the Romney, Hythe, and Dymchurch; the Ravenglass; all the Welsh lines; and more. They loved steam. They would drive hundreds of miles in their Ford Escort to take a steam train. They were members of a steam railway preservation society. They lived in Luton. This one reminded them of the line in Shepton Mallet.
Then Mrs. Mutton said, "Where's your casual top?"
"I don't have a casual top in brown, do I," Mr. Mutton said.
"Why are you wearing brown?"
Mr. Mutton said, "I can't wear blue all the time, can I."
Rhoda Gauntlett was at the window. She said, "That sea looks so lovely. And that grass. It's a golf course."
We looked at the golf course—Sheringham, so soon.
"I'd get confused going round a golf course," Mrs. Mutton said. "You walk bloody miles. How do you know which way to go?"
This was the only train in Britain today, the fifteen-minute ride from Weybourne. It was sunny in Sheringham—a thousand people on the sandy beach, but only two people in the water.
There were three old ladies walking along the Promenade. They had strong country accents, probably Norfolk. I could never place these burrs and haws.
"I should have worn my blooming hat."
"The air's fresh, but it's making my eyes water."
"We can look round Woolworth's after we've had our tea."
It was a day at the seaside, and then back to their cottages in Great Snoring. They were not like the others, who had come to sit behind canvas windbreaks ("eighty pence per day or any portion thereof') and read FOUR KILLED BY RUNAWAY LORRY or WIFE KILLER GIVEN THREE YEARS (she had taunted him about money; he did not earn much; he bashed her brains out with a hammer; "You've: suffered enough," the judge said) or BLUNDESTON CHILD BATTERED (bruised tot with broken leg; "He fell off a chair," the mother said; one year, pending psychiatric report). They crouched on the groynes, smoking cigarettes. They lay in the bright sunshine wearing raincoats. They stood in their bathing suits. Their skin was the veiny white of raw sausage casings.
The tide was out, so I walked to Cromer along the sand. The crumbly yellow-dirt cliffs were like the banks of a quarry, high and scooped out and raked vertically by erosion. Halfway between Sheringham and Cromer there were no people, because, characteristically, the English never strayed far from their cars, and even the most crowded parts of the English coast were empty between the parking lots. Only one man was here, Collie Wylie, a rock collector. He was hacking amber-colored tubes out of the chalk slabs on the shore. Belamites, he called them. "Take that one," he said. "Now that one is between five and eight million years old."
I saw a pillbox down the beach. It had once been on top of the cliff, and inside it the men from "Dads' Army" had conned for Germans. "Jerry would love to catch us on the hop." But the soft cliffs were constantly falling, and the pillbox had slipped a hundred feet and was now sinking into the sand, a cute little artifact from the war, buried to its gunholes.
I came to Cromer. An old man in a greasy coat sat on a wooden groyne on the beach, reading a comic book about war in outer space.
***
Seaside Special '82 was playing at the Pavilion Theatre, at the end of the pier at Cromer. It was the summer show, July to September, every day except Sunday, and two matinées. I had not gone to any of these end-of-the-pier shows. I was nearing the end of my circular tour, so I decided to stay in Cromer and see the show. I found a hotel. Cromer was very empty. It had a sort of atrophied charm, a high round-shouldered Edwardian look, red brick terraces and red brick hotels and the loudest seagulls in Norfolk.
There were not more than thirty people in the audience that night at the Pavilion Theatre, which was pathetic, because there were nine people in the show. But seeing the show was like observing England's secret life—its anxiety in the dismal jokes, its sadness in the old songs.
"Hands up, all those who aren't working," one comedian said.
A number of hands went up—eight or ten—but this was a terrible admission, and down they went before I could count them properly.
The comedian was already laughing. "Have some Beecham Pills," he said. "They'll get you 'working' again!"
There were more jokes, awful ones like this, and then a lady singer came out and in a sweet voice sang "The Russian Nightingale." She encouraged the audience to join in the chorus of the next one, and they offered timid voices, singing,
"Let him go, let him tarry,
Let him sink, or let him swim.
He doesn't care for me
And I don't care for him."
The comedians returned. They had changed their costumes. They had worn floppy hats the first time; now they wore bowler hats and squirting flowers.
"We used to put manure on our rhubarb."
"We used to put custard on ours!"
No one laughed.
"Got any matches?"
"Yes, and they're good British ones."
"How do you know?"
"Because they're all strikers!"
A child in the first row began to cry.
The dancers came on. They were pretty girls and they danced well. They were billed as "Our Disco Dollies" on the poster. More singers appeared and "A Tribute to Al Jolson" was announced: nine minstrel show numbers, done in blackface. Entertainers in the United States could be run out of town for this sort of thing; in Cromer the audience applauded. Al Jolson was a fond memory and his rendition of "Mammy" was a special favorite in musical revues. No one had ever tired of minstrel shows in England, and they persisted on British television well into the 1970s.
It had been less than a month since the end of the Falklands War, but in the second half of Seaside Special there was a comedy routine in which an Argentine general appeared—goofy dago in ill-fitting khaki uniform—"How dare you insult me!"
I could hear the surf sloshing against the iron struts of the pier.
"And you come and pour yourself on me," a man was singing. It was a love song. The audience seemed embarrassed by it. They preferred "California Here I Come" and "When I Grow Too Old to Dream," sung by a man named Derick, from Johannesburg. The program said that he had "appeared in every top night spot in South Africa and Rhodesia." Say "top night spot in Zimbabwe" and it does not sound the same—it brings to mind drums and thick foliage.