The Kingdom by the Sea (16 page)

I went back to St. Erth and changed for the main-line train to Liskeard, going back the way I had come, past the mining chimneys and the clay deposits and the great hard sweeps of stony land and the green glades that each contained a large house—one comfortable family—but no more.

The branch-line train to Looe was waiting at Liskeard. It ran on a single track through a narrow ravine under the main-line viaduct and made a big loop through the countryside, past ivy-covered walls and steep hills to Coombe Junction, where a man in a rubber raincoat yanked levers to change the points, nudging the train down the branch line to Looe and the coast. There were about twenty-five people on the three coaches of this train, and the train went so slowly, it did not even startle the horses cropping grass by the side of the track.

The woods on this rainy day were deep green. The branches bumped and brushed the windows. The nearness of the trees and the slowness of the trains were the best things about the branch lines.

We came to St. Keyne. There was a famous well here. "The reported virtue of the water is this, that, whether husband or wife come first to drink thereof, they get the mastery thereby." There is a ballad by Southey in which a man describes how, just after his wedding, he went to the "gifted Well" and had a drink, so that he would be "Master for life," but his wife was quicker-witted.

I hastened, as soon as the wedding was done,
And left my Wife in the porch;
But i' faith she had been wiser than me,
For she took a bottle to church.

Even so slight a poem as this seemed to give the acre of woods at St. Keyne a curious importance. This was true all over England, which was why England was so hard to describe: much of it had been written about by great men, and the very mention of a place in a literary work tended to distort the place, for literature had the capacity to turn the plainest corner of England into a shrine.

We came to Sandplace and then Causeland. The Looe River was hardly a river here—you could jump across it at Causeland—but then it widened from a creek into something more substantial, a waterway containing tussocky islands. On one of them there was a swan sleeping in a nest, looking like the fragments of a failed wedding cake, and the rocks of the shore looked nastily like dead ferrets. At the confluence of the West Looe and East Looe rivers we passed the steep narrow harbor of Looe, another apparently magnetized village, and a sign saying, "Headquarters of the Shark Angling Club of Great Britain."

It was still light, and I was stiff from my shuttling back and forth with my Cornish Explorer ticket. And the rain had finally stopped. So I oiled my hiking shoes and as night fell I walked along the coastal cliffs, past Hendersick and through the buttercups at the Warren above Talland Bay to Polperro. Just below Crumplehorn—I muttered the names to myself as I went—I found a pleasant-looking pub and got a room for the night. Everything seemed very simple and there was always enough daylight to do anything I pleased.

Polperro was a village of whitewashed cottages tumbled together in a rocky ravine on the sea. The streets were as narrow as alleys, and few of them could take motor vehicles. I saw a full-sized bus try to make it down one street—hopeless. At best, one small car could inch down a street, knocking the petals off geraniums in the window boxes at either side. When two cars met head-on there was usually an argument over who was to reverse to let the other pass.

The loathing for tourists and outsiders in Cornwall was undisguised—I had a feeling that it was the tourists who had made the Cornish nationalistic, for no one adopted a funny native costume quicker or talked more intimidatingly of local tradition than the local person under siege by tourists. Polperro was a pretty funnel but with the narrowest neck, so there was nowhere to go but the tiny harbor. It was true that the Cornish derived most of their income from tourists, but there was no contradiction in the way they both welcomed and disliked us at the same time. Natives always had very sound reasons for disliking outsiders; the Cornish fishermen had nothing whatever to do with tourists, but the other Cornish were farming people and treated tourists like livestock—feeding them, fencing them in, and getting them to move to new pastures. We were cumbersome burdens, a great headache most of the time, but at the end of the day there was some profit in us.

Mr. Tregeagle, the hotel-keeper I met in Polperro, had been a farmer for thirty years. He had dairy cattle, between sixty and seventy head, and he also grew vegetables. The month before I arrived in the village he had chucked his farm in Bodmin. He had bought this little hotel in the hope of making a living, but he laughed when he admitted that he had never run a hotel before and knew practically nothing about it.

"But I was losing thousands on my milk," Mr. Tregeagle said. "I owed money to the bank. The price of feed increased and the price of milk dropped. Last year it was terrible. I was in debt and I was working eighteen hours a day. I said to myself, 'What's the point?' I began selling my cows. I hated doing it, but I had no choice."

"What about your vegetables?" I said. "You could feed yourself, couldn't you?"

"The vegetables were useless. I had a garden full of lovely lettuces. One morning I brought three crates—about a hundred lettuces—down to the local greengrocer. He offered me a penny apiece for them. A bloody quid for three crates!"

"Did you sell them?"

"I took them home and buried them, and I plowed the rest of them under. And then I said, 'That's it—I'm selling.' The Tregeagles have been farming here for generations, but we'll never go back to the land again."

There was a South African couple at the hotel, Tony and Norah Swart. He was a fat and rather silent red-faced man in his mid-forties, and she was harder and younger, talkative and unsmiling, a girl with a grudge. Tony's silence was a kind of apology, for Norah was usually complaining, and she had that hypersensitivity which some South Africans have, the bristling suspicion that at any moment she is going to be accused of being a bumpkin, and the justified fear that she
is
a bumpkin—proud of and at the same time hating her snarling accent and bad manners.

It had been a horrible trip from Capetown. They had wanted to stop in Nigeria and Zaire, but those African countries would not let them enter. Norah Swart said, "It's bloddy unfair."

I said this was probably because Africans were discriminated against in South Africa. They treated Africans like dogs, so African countries were disinclined to put out the red carpet for South Africans.

"The real trouble," Mrs. Swart said, "is that we were too nice to them. When the Australians were shooting their Abos and you were killing your Indians, we were looking after our blacks."

"Of course," I said. "You're famous for looking after your blacks."

"Kristy, my Australian friend, said to me, 'If you'd shot yours like we did ours, you wouldn't have these problems today.'"

I said, "What a pity you didn't exterminate them."

"That's what I say," Mrs. Swart said. The thought of mass murder softened her features and for the first time she looked almost pretty.

But her husband saw I was being sarcastic. He kept his gaze on me and went very quiet.

They especially hated the Africans in Namibia. They called it "South-West"; they said it belonged to them, they wanted to raise caracols there, and Norah Swart made a noise at me when I asked her what a caracol was. They said they would never willingly turn it over to African rule, but when I said that African rule was inevitable in Namibia ("Stop calling it Namibia," she said), the Swarts said they would fight for it. It was an empty land, Tony Swart said—only 400,000 people in it. He swore this figure was correct, but later I checked and found the population to be almost two million, of whom 75,000 were white.

I asked them where they had traveled in England.

"Lyme Regis," Mrs. Swart said. "Where they made that movie."

"We're just motoring down the coast."

"What was the name of that movie, Tone?"

Tony shook his head. He did not know.

Mrs. Swart said, "People around here keep telling us to read Daphne Du Maurier. Have you read it?"

She thought Daphne Du Maurier was the name of a novel. Instead of setting her straight, I said that it was a very good novel indeed and that the author, Rebecca something, had written many others. I urged her to ask for
Daphne
at the local bookshop.

Polperro was in such a deep ravine that the sun did not strike it in the morning. I walked through the damp dark village—straight overhead the sky was blue—and climbed out of the little harbor onto the cliffs just as a bright mist descended. It hung lightly over the rocky shore and the purple sea, and created luminous effects of live creatures appearing and disappearing near the tumbledown cliff was green, from the top to the sea, full of ivy and meadow grass and the foam sliding patchily back from the rocks. Bright and indistinct with shadowy light, and softened by mist, the whole coast that morning was like a Turner watercolor, or more than one, because it kept dripping and changing, the greens and blues becoming sharper as the morning wore on.

I was setting out to have lunch at Fowey, and I planned to walk on to Par, where there was a railway junction. The grass on this path was wet with mist and dew, and before I had gone half a mile my shoes were soaked, in spite of the oil I had put on them in Looe.

This was the softer side of Cornwall, damper and greener than the north coast, which was pounded by the Atlantic. The whole cliff was green, from the top to the sea, full of ivy and meadow grass and brambles. The cliffs of Cornwall were depicted always as rocky, like ruined castles and castle walls. "I like Cornwall very much. It is not England," D. H. Lawrence wrote. "It is bare and dark and elemental ... bare and sad under a level sky." He meant the other coast, the Cornish stereotype of black headlands on a choppy sea, and charming desolation. But here on the path to Fowey the cliffs were like steep meadows. The bramble bushes and the gorse made a mild reflection in the water; the trailing ivy gave a delicacy to the sea; and the foliage muffled the wind. The air was sweetened by all this greenery, and the fragrance of the rain was emphasized by its soft stutter on the grass. There was nothing elemental here, thank God.

Two battered old ladies appeared on the path, tramping toward me out of the gorse—Miss Brace and Miss Badcock. They were half-naked, leathery, and terrifying in halters and faded shorts, and though it was cool on these cliffs, they were perspiring. Old ladies in skimpy clothes could look defenseless. These two looked formidable—rather plump and plain and dauntless, with lined faces, and varicose veins standing out on their calves like thongs. They were very brown. They carried walking sticks with spiked tips. One had a bright patch on her shorts saying
Bad-Gastein.
They were Ramblers, they said, and then, as if to prove it, said they had walked here from Land's End.

"And we 'aven't tooched pooblic transport," Miss Brace said. Her rucksack must have weighed a hundred pounds. She had the tent; Miss Badcock had the cooking gear—you could hear the clink of the skillet.

Miss Badcock said, "'ow mooch does your knapsack weigh?"

Northerners. I said, "Not much." They plumped it with their hands and weighed it and laughed, taking me for a twinkie.

"We've got spare shoes," Miss Badcock said.

"Let's go, Vera," Miss Brace said. And she explained to me. "We're in a hoora to find accommodation in Polperro."

I said, "Polperro is full of hotels."

"We want a youth hostel," Miss Brace said.

A youth hostel? They were each well over sixty—Miss Badcock looked closer to seventy. I could see Miss Badcock's navel.

They had walked a hundred and fifteen miles since last Thursday. Had they seen anything interesting?

Miss Brace said, "We 'ad soom nice coves and bays. We 'ad soom nice villages. We joost walk by."

Miss Badcock said, "We don't stop mooch."

They asked me where I was going. I said, "To Fowey and then to Par today."

Miss Brace said, "It's a canny little step."

A canny little step
was similar to
a fair old trot.
Why didn't the English ever use the word "far"?

We went our separate ways, and now it began to rain. Miss Brace had said that was the reason they were so scantily dressed—because of the rain: fewer clothes to get wet, and they dried quicker. I had been ashamed to say that I had a hooded plastic raincoat. I now put it on and walked around Lantivet Bay and on to Lantic Bay, where the water was wonderfully marbled with sea foam, the white veiny effect heightened by the luminous blue-green water, which was flat and gleaming.

Toward lunchtime I walked around Blackbottle Rock and into the village of Polruan. This village was so tiny, and its roads so narrow, a sign to the entrance of the village said: "Vehicular Access to Village Prohibited for Day Visitors 10am-6pm."

It was strange, the way some of these villages were protected. Polruan was sealed off: no traffic. But people still lived there, taking refuge in their small houses and the distant past. And visitors parked up the road and wandered around, peering through cottage windows and remarking on the cobblestones.

There was a ferry from Polruan to Fowey, across Fowey Harbour. The ferry sign said:

Adults 25p
Children 25p
Dogs 12p
Pram 12p
Cycle 25p

All these villages looked better from the water, face-on like Fowey from its ferry, with all their watching windows and all the peeling paint and storm damage. Fowey was perpendicular, built around the rock shelves of the steep harbor, and the houses were faded and stately. At the head of the harbor was a green wedge of woods and the emptying Fowey River, and at the harbor mouth high battlements in ruins. Fowey had been a harbor from ancient times. It looked an excellent place to start a long voyage, because it was a beautiful settled place, like a serene lakeside village.

I had my lunch—a sandwich—on the cliff at the west side of the harbor and, startling the wrens in the hedges, set off again. I walked at the margins of pastures, on the cliff edges above the sea, and around coves to a headland called the Gribbin, where there was a candy-striped beacon—a marker for sailors. From this height I could see St. Austell, and Par sprinkled at the head of St. Austell Bay, and twenty miles of coast—mountainous heaps of china-clay refuse, and Black Head, and the whole of dark blue Mevagissey Bay as far as Dodman Point. The distant rocks in the sea were called the Gwinges.