The villages in East Anglia were all sorts—small stingy-rich places, ruined settlements, tiny hamlets with long memories, collapsing churches surrounded by desolation, shally cities, and coastal horrors on rotting docks. Caister-on-Sea had been a Roman camp, and now it was a caravan park, just squat dingy houses, and pup tents, and "caravanettes," and a man in his underwear, lying on a small rug of grass by the roadside and sunning his spotty back as the traffic roared past. So much for the romance of Caesar's Caister. Place names were always misleading. Freshfields was always the semislum, and Messing, Turdley, and Swines always the pretty villages.
"Great Yarmouth, with its mile of Cockneyfied sea-front and its overflow of nigger minstrelsy, now strikes the wrong note so continuously that I, for my part, became conscious on the spot, of a chill to the spirit of research." Thus Henry James, fluttering his hands and perspiring and easing his big bum into the next train south. He had hoped to sit on the Front and sink into a reverie of David Copperfield and the Peggottys. But it was often a mistake in England to revisit fictional landscapes. Local people blamed the German bombing for Great Yarmouth's gappy, still-damaged look, but James's dismay was proof that the town had been just as raucous and profane a hundred years ago. Yet that was in itself interesting; aliens usually missed the point about England by investing its landscape with the passions of its great literature, and it had so seldom been seen plainly, without literary footnotes. Like England, Great Yarmouth's chief attraction was that it was no longer a place of reverential pilgrimage. It had long ago stopped being Dickensian.
There was a circus in town; there was all-in wrestling—Giant Haystacks was fighting a grudge match against Big Daddy. Space in My Pajamas was playing at a theater on the Front: "Miss Fiona Richmond, Live on Stage! A Non-Stop Nude Laughter Romp—the Ultimate Sexual Fantasy!" There were now two miles of sea-front—roller coasters, amusement arcades, shooting galleries. The town had swollen and burst long ago, but it had the English seaside characteristic of being self-destructive in its own way. The shows were popular and well attended, perhaps because they lacked the decent vulgarity of those at Cromer.
"That wally on the poster. I heard him on the flipping wireless."
The accents of Great Yarmouth's visitors were the accents of London—a certain class, sticking to old-fashioned expressions and stubborn intonations.
"Let's nip over one of them caffys."
And the two boys kicked at the traffic and hurried under the sign Frying for Dinner-Tea-Supper.
The coast between here and Lowestoft was poor for walking: it was populous and bungalow-ridden, and the only place to walk was on the main road. I hiked to Gorleston, a mile or so, and gave up. A new hospital had been built at Gorleston. It was flimsily made and very ugly; it also looked temporary and unsafe. The national poverty was now evident in public buildings, some of them almost unbelievable eyesores. She just let herself go, people said of the woman who got fat and stopped combing her hair. Sometimes Britain seemed that way to me. And it was too bad a hospital looked so inadequate, because Britain had the best public health service in the world and certainly the fairest doctors.
At Lowestoft I began to understand East Anglia's modest prosperity. Lowestoft had large produce markets and on its seafront a frozen food plant as vast as a power station. East Anglia was intensively farmed, and all those vegetables I had seen ended up here in ice bricks. After the failure of its automobile industry and its steel mills and its electronics factories, one of Britain's most notable postwar successes was growing Birds Eye spinach.
The railway station at Lowestoft was open, but when I asked a group of men gathered there whether there were any trains, they laughed.
"Come back September first," Mr. Fricker said.
They were all railwaymen. They were not picketing; they had just come to the station out of habit. They had nothing else to do.
"No trains at all," Mr. Beamish said. "This station is one hundred percent."
Mr. Holmesome, a driver, said, "Want to know the truth? The drivers here don't want to come out on strike. We're just doing it out of loyalty to the union. This isn't a busy station. It's only average. If the strike goes on, this will be one of the first stations to be axed, and then we'll lose our jobs, and we'll be in the shit with everyone else."
It was one hour and twenty minutes from Lowestoft to Ipswich. By bus it was almost three hours—it took all morning. It was a little over forty miles.
But I was headed down the coast for Southwold. I went to the bus station: Was there a bus? "Left an hour ago, squire"—"squire" because the news was bad, a further turn of the screw; sarcasm, not politeness. There was not another bus to Southwold today.
"I have to get to Southwold," I said.
"I'd hitchhike, if I were you," he said. "That's the only sure way."
This was spoken to me in a town (pop. 52,000) on the coast of England in the summer of 1982. Hitchhike ... that's the only sure way. Good God.
I walked a few miles to Kessingland and then stuck out my thumb.
"My mistake was stopping too long in my jobs. And this Jewboy," Mr. Marwood said wearily as we drove toward Southwold, "though I didn't have anything against his religion, took advantage of me. I was earning five pounds, ten shillings in 1948. It was a good wage—I was sixteen. I was on commission. I started to sell cheese rolls—this was a grocery store, and we did a little bit of greengrocery. The profit on cheese rolls was five hundred percent. My commission was sixpence in the pound. I worked very hard, but when my wages went up to seven pounds this Jewboy claimed he couldn't pay me. i don't have that kind of money,' he said. Imagine. So I left. I just told him what he could do with his job, and I found another one. There's always work for people who want it."
Southwold was one of those coastal villages which had become remote with the closure of its railway. It was now emptier and more rural than it had been twenty years ago. On a small house on Main Street there was a plaque saying The Author George Orwell (E. A. Blair) Resided Here. It was after he had been down and out in Paris and London; he had no money; he lived with his parents—this was their house. He got his pen name from a river some distance south of here on the Essex coast—the Orwell.
"I always pick up hitchhikers," Mr. Grainer said. There was no coast path to Dunwich, only marshes and an intrusive estuary. Mr. Grainer picked up a silent man and then a girl with a rucksack, all in the space of a few miles. He never passed a hitchhiker if he had a spare seat.
"It's a lot of wear and tear on a car," I said.
Mr. Grainer laughed out loud. "Not my car!" He was delivering it to a car dealer, he said. That was his job, delivering cars. He was so badly paid for doing it, he took his revenge by picking up every hitchhiker he saw. He laughed again. "My guv'nor would do his nut if he saw me now."
The girl said to call her "Jerry." She was on vacation. She taught school in Africa—the Sudan.
"We get a lot of spare parts from South Africa," Mr. Grainer said.
Jerry said that the Sudan was not anywhere near South Africa.
"All the same to me," Mr. Grainer said, cheerfully. "Cannibals and communists!"
Dunwich ("once an important seaport, before the sea swept it away") was a disjointed village scattered thinly against a lumpy green shore. Everyone said how sad it was that it was no longer prosperous, but its prosperity had come in the Middle Ages, and by 1800 it was an impoverished fishing village. Its empty, depopulated atmosphere inspired ghost stories, tales of sinking spells that traveled through Dunwich houses, and the legend of the Black Dog, a phantom hound that appeared at night in the village and caused acute depression. Dunwich was one of the strangest places on the coast—famous for no longer existing.