Many villages on this shore were associated with ghosts. It was the low boggy land, the marshes, the fogs, the shifting sands, the long tides, and the medieval churches of cracked stone. Here were some of the oldest Christian graveyards in England, and they lay in a landscape that cast forth ghostly mirages. Some of this atmosphere had been invented by Montague Rhodes James in his powerful stories of the supernatural. But his topographical descriptions could be very accurate, especially when (in "A Warning to the Curious") he spoke of approaching a town and seeing "a belt of old firs, wind-beaten, thick at the top, with the slope that old seaside trees have; seen on the skyline from the train they would tell you in an instant, if you did not know it, that you were approaching a windy coast." That was Aldeburgh.
So some fictional landscapes were still worth revisiting. Aldeburgh, too, had lost its train, and from eighteen trains a day (nine in, nine out), it was now a parking lot lined with exquisite buildings, with a shingly beach riding over its streets. The Moot Hall displayed a message from Buckingham Palace that had just been nailed up: "We were both most touched by your very kind message on the birth of our son. We have been overwhelmed by the reaction to this exciting event. Best wishes."
***
At the bottom edge of Suffolk, the coast collapsed in a mass of marshes and estuaries. There was no coastal path. Strictly speaking, there was no coast, but only forty miles of low waterlogged land, and isolated towns at the end of long flat roads. It corresponded to the complexity of the Scottish coast at the opposite end of the country, except that this was sand, not rock, and instead of surf whipping into cliffs, this had a shallow sinking look. It was in and out to Felixstowe and Harwich and the Naze; I was fighting the strike, but also finding it funny that I now woke up in Walton-on-the-Naze and, packing my knapsack and oiling my shoes and putting an apple into my pocket and saying goodbye to Mrs. Dumper at the Elms, set off like a man with a mission. I may have looked something like Robert Byron on the road to Oxiana, but in fact I was on my way to Frinton-on-Sea.
Frinton had its surprises. It was posh. Who would have guessed it from its name? There was a settlement of houses behind a fence with the sign Frinton Gates; no trees—always an indication in an English suburb of a preference for rose gardens and herbaceous borders; large smug villas and a grassy Esplanade and not a chip shop in sight. It was a Tory stronghold; that was clear: you could tell by the tone of the golf club—by its forbidding gates. And Frinton was also sealed off from the rest of Britain. To get into the town it was necessary to go through a sort of valve, which was a level crossing on the railway line. It was a maddening bottleneck, but it had kept Frinton unviolated—it was the only way in or out of the place.
I walked on to Clacton, which was brash and noisy—holiday people, a holiday camp, trippers, and picnickers. I met a man named Arthur who said that if he had lived right, saved his money instead of losing it on the dogs, used his loaf instead of trusting people who had said they'd see him right, he would have ended up in Frinton in a detached house instead of a semidetached in Clacton. That was characteristic of the English: they did not allude to distant places on the coast when they were making comparisons. They would play with a mile or two and compare their lot in Bournemouth with what it might have been in Poole; they compared Brighton with Hove, Whitby with Sandsend, Exmouth with Budleigh Salterton. They did not reach far when they tried to imagine how their lives might have been different. And, really, Clacton wasn't so bad, Arthur said, when you compared it to Jaywick Sands.
"Jaywick's a shantytown," Arthur said.
It was. There was sand in the streets. People slept in the shallys. Most houses were shacks the size of one-car garages. Jaywick was crowded and cheap. It looked as though it had taken a terrific thumping—war or weather—and was awfully battered, like a seaside slum in Argentina or Mexico. It had the same grubby geniality, the same broken fences. The beach was empty. This was a Sunday in late July. Two women stood facing the murky sea. They were holding hands. I was especially fascinated by their affection, because the smaller one was pregnant. They were Roberta and Mandy; they had been living together in a borrowed bungalow at Jaywick for five months as a couple. Roberta had left her husband in Dagenham after she had met Mandy and realized she was a lesbian. She had been two months pregnant then. Mandy had been a tower of strength, and tonight they were going to a prenatal class of the National Childbirth Trust up in Clacton—breathing exercises and general awareness. Mandy said, "I'm her labor support." They were planning to raise the child themselves.
At last I took a bus to Southend, an inland detour, because there was no direct way across the flats and sands of the Essex coast. There were no trains running. The bus went over the hills with a natural bounce, and to the east it was impossible to tell the brown land from the brown sea; one ran into the other. Here, the sea was the River Thames at its widest part. I met Brenda Priestley on the bus. She had worked at Harvey Nichols Department Store in London. She had served Mahatma Gandhi one day. Handkerchiefs—a box of three, Irish linen, lovely they were. He seemed an odd one, though—wearing a sort of a nappy. I looked out the window, trying to imagine it, and saw sliding gulls, and a boy behind me muttered, "Sowfen."
Even Southend had a respectable district—the higher, leafier ledge called Westcliff. The seedy part of Southend was down the hill, below the crumbling white wedding cake of the Palace Hotel, and the Kursaal amusement park. This was where the gangs fought at Easter—and not only then, but on every Bank Holiday. Just a few months ago two thousand Skinheads had battled two thousand Mods. But they had not destroyed buildings; they had not broken windows or set fires. They had not even made much noise, people said. They had broken each others' heads on the Promenade along the seafront. To slow them down, the police confiscated their bootlaces as soon as the boys had gotten off the train at Southend Central.
This was high summer, but Southend was as empty as it had been in March. It was the effect of the strike in this railway resort. Without trains, it was hard to get in or out. Traditionally, it was for day-trippers—Londoners; its atmosphere wasn't briney and coastal—it was riverbank sag, the greasy Thames, London toughness. In many senses Southend was a part of London. The river was its spiritual link, but the river was not put to any practical use. The physical link, the railway, had been severed by the strike, and now Southend was revealed in this empty condition as a mixture of river rawness and sleazy elegance. The few people here were not vacationers. They were between jobs, between lives, waiting for something to open up. Other places could do without the railway, but Southend was strangling, because this seaside place was not on the way to anywhere except Foulness, which was one of the very few aptly named places in the country.
"That little geezer with the piggy eyes," a toothless young man named Ron Woodbag said. The isolation made people irritable. He was amazingly tattooed—his neck, his face, the backs of his hands. So was the fellow he was now addressing—spider webs on his forearms, Britannia on his chest, skulls on his knuckles. "I'm going to kill that geezer."
But Ron Woodbag did not do anything. This was in the Foresters' Arms. The jukebox was deafening, playing the hits of Britain's most popular music groups—Raw Sewage ("Kick It to Death"), Nupkins ("Yellow Pain"), Slag ("What You Like to Eat"), Gender-Bender ("Getting It Behind You"); and then a live group, Spurm, got up on the little stage and howled. They looked like ferrets; they had spiky hair and claws. But they were harmless—pale skinny English faces and bad teeth. The bikers and punks in the bar were well behaved. Like many other places I had seen in Britain, it looked much worse than it was. It was not vicious; it just had that dirty desecrated look that I thought of as English. There was no vice that I had seen, no red-light district, nothing wicked, nothing stirring after midnight, on the whole of the British coast.