To the Ends of the Earth Page 22

  “The English started to believe what they saw on television,” Bob Ewart said. “They actually thought all that stuff about bombs and murders was true!”

  He himself was from Nottingham.

  “I’ve lived here fourteen years and I’ve yet to see an angry man.”

  That night the movie on television was Invasion of the Body Snatchers. I watched it with the Irish hotel workers. It was a horror movie about the world being taken over by alien germs. The Irishmen said it was frightening and of course went to bed happy. Then it struck me that a horror movie could enjoy a great popular success only if its frights were preposterous—like someone saying “Boo!” The ultimate horror was really what was happening in many Ulster towns: bombs, murders, people’s hands being hacksawed off, or men having their kneecaps shot off as a punishment for disloyalty, or the tar-and-feathering of young girls for socializing with soldiers. Because this was the truth—unlike the Hollywood monster movie—it was worse than frightening: it was unbearable.

  And the next day a man named Guilfoyle told me there was quite a bit of rural crime in the border areas—cattle maiming. I had no idea what he was talking about. He explained that to take revenge on farmers, some of the republican country folk sneaked into the pastures at night and knifed off the cows’ udders.

  Mooney’s Hotel

  IN BELFAST I STAYED IN A DIRTY HOTEL WITH A DAMP INTERIOR and wallpaper that smelled of tobacco smoke and beer and the breakfast grease. But there was no security check here. I had been searched in Enniskillen, a town that hadn’t had a bomb in years; and I would have been searched at the grand Europa Hotel in Belfast—it was surrounded by a high barbed-wire fence and had sentries and guard dogs. The tourists and journalists stayed at the Europa—it was a good target for bombs. But no one of any importance stayed at Mooney’s Hotel.

  I called it Mooney’s because it greatly resembled Mrs. Mooney’s flophouse in James Joyce’s story “The Boarding House.” Our Mrs. Mooney also had an enormous florid face and fat arms and red hands, and she catered to traveling salesmen and drifters. The carpets were ragged, the wallpaper was peeling, there were nicks all over the woodwork. But I was free there, and I would not have been free in an expensive hotel; and I also thought that in this grubby place I was out of danger. It was Belfast logic, but it was also a pattern of life that I was sure would become more common in the cities of the future.

  The bar at Mooney’s was busy all night, filling the whole building with smoke and chatter.

  “What time does the bar close?” I asked on my first night.

  “October,” a drinker told me, and laughed.

  No one admitted to breaking the law in Ulster. The most they said was “Look what they make us do!” It was as if all the street violence were imaginary or else rigged by soldiers who (so it was said in Derry) coaxed children into starting riots. It was slippery, shadowy, tribal; it was all stealth. It was a folk tradition of flag waving and the most petty expression of religious bigotry west of Jerusalem: the Linfield Football Club of Belfast had a clause in its constitution stipulating that no Catholic could ever play on its team. Apart from the bombing, it was not a public crime anymore. It was sneaking ambushes and doorstep murders (“I’ve got something for your father”) and land mines in the country lanes. Some of the worst crimes took place in the prettiest rural places—the shootings and house burnings and the cattle maiming—in the green hills, with the birds singing.

  People said, “There’s no solution.… Ireland’s always had troubles.… Maybe it’ll die out.… I suppose we could emigrate.…”

  I kept thinking: This is Britain!

  It was like being shut in with a quarreling family and listening to cries of “You started it!” and “He hit me!” And I felt about Ulster as I had felt about some south coast boardinghouses on rainy days—I wanted to tiptoe to the front door and leave quietly and keep walking.

  But I was grateful, too. No one had imposed on me. I had done nothing but ask questions, and I had always received interesting answers. I had met hospitable and decent people. No one had ever asked me what I did for a living. Perhaps this was tact: it was an impolite question in a place where so many people were on the dole.

  I had been asked the question in England and Wales. “I’m in publishing,” I always said. Publishing was respectable, harmless, and undiscussable. The conversation moved on to other matters, “I’m a writer” was a fatal admission, and certainly one of the great conversation stoppers. Anyway, with me in wet shoes and scratched leather jacket and bruised knapsack, would anyone have believed I was a writer? But no one knew what publishers looked like.

  On my last night in Belfast, I was asked. I was at Mooney’s talking to Mr. Doran, and I had asked too many questions about his upbringing, his mother, his ambitions, the crime rate, his job—

  “And what do you do?” Doran asked, risking the question no one else had dared.

  Obviously I did something. I was an alien.

  “I’m in publishing,” I said.

  Doran’s face lit up. Not once in seven weeks of my saying this had anyone responded so brightly. But this was Ireland.

  “I’m working on a wee novel,” Doran said, and ordered me another pint. “I’ve got about four hundred pages done—it’s right in me room upstairs. Let’s meet tomorrow and have another jar. I’ll bring me novel with me. You’ll love it. It’s all about the troubles.”

  The next day I tiptoed past Doran’s room. I heard the flutterblast of his snoring. I slipped out of Mooney’s and shut the door on Ulster.

  Cape Wrath

  SOME FANTASIES PREPARE US FOR REALITY. THE SHARP STEEP Cuillins were like mountains from a storybook—they had a dramatic, fairy-tale strangeness. But Cape Wrath on the northwest coast of Scotland was unimaginable. It was one of those places where, I guessed, every traveler felt like a discoverer who was seeing it for the first time. There are not many such places in the world. I felt I had penetrated a fastness of mountains and moors, after two months of searching, and I had found something new. So even this old, overscrutinized kingdom had a secret patch of coast! I was very happy at Cape Wrath. I even liked its ambiguous name. I did not want to leave.

  There were other people in the area: a hard-pressed set-dement of sheep farmers and fishermen, and a community of dropouts making pots and jewelry and quilts at the edge of Balnakeil. There were anglers and campers, too, and every so often a brown plane flew overhead and dropped bombs on one of the Cape Wrath beaches, where the army had a firing range. But the size of the place easily absorbed these people. They were lost in it, and as with all people in a special place, they were secretive and a little suspicious of strangers.

  Only the real natives were friendly. They were the toughest Highlanders and they did not match any Scottish stereotype I knew. They did not even have a recognizably Scottish accent. They were like white crows. They were courteous, hospitable, hard-working, and funny. They epitomized what was best in Scotland, the strong cultural pride that was separate from political nationalism. That took confidence. They were independent, too—thrawn was the Lowlands word for their stubborn character. I admired their sense of equality, their disregard for class, and the gentle way they treated their children and animals. They were tolerant and reliable, and none of this was related to the flummery of bagpipes and sporrans and tribalistic blood-and-thunder that Sir Walter Scott had turned into the Highland cult. What I liked most about them was that they were self-sufficient. They were the only people I had seen on the whole coast who were looking after themselves.

  It was a shire full of mountains, with spaces between—some valleys and some moors—and each mountain was separate. To describe the landscape it was necessary to describe each mountain, because each one was unique. But the soil was not very good, the sheep were small, the grass thin, and I never walked very far without finding a corpse—loose wool blowing around bones, and the bared teeth of a skull.

  “Look,” a shepherd named Stephen said to me on one
of these hillsides.

  A buzzard-sized bird was circling.

  “It’s a hooded crow,” Stephen said. “They’re desperate creatures. In a place like this—no shelter, no one around for miles—they find a lamb and peck its eyes out. It’s lost, it can’t get to its mother, it gets weak. Then the hooded crows—so patient up there—dive low and peck it to pieces. They’re a terrible bird.”

  He said that it was the predatory crows, not the weather, that killed the lambs. It was a cold place, but not excessively so. In winter there was little snow, though the winds were strong and the easterlies were usually freezing gales. There were always birds in the wind—crows and hawks and comic squawking oystercatchers with long orange bills and singing larks and long-necked shags and stuttering stonechats.

  It could be an eerie landscape, especially on a wet day, with all the scattered bones gleaming against the dun-colored cliffs and the wind scraping against the heather. It surprised me that I was happy in a place where there were so few trees—there were none at all here. It was not picturesque and it was practically unphotographable. It was stunningly empty. It looked like a corner of another planet, and at times it seemed diabolical. But I liked it for all these reasons. And more important than these, my chief reason for being happy was that I felt safe here. The landscape was like a fierce-looking monster that offered me protection; being in Cape Wrath was like having a pet dragon.

  Royal Visit

  I TRIED TO HITCHHIKE IN ORDER TO GET TO ANSTRUTHER IN time to see the Queen, but no one picked me up. I fell in with a farm laborer on the road. He was coming from St. Andrews. He had gone there for the Royal Visit.

  “I saw the Queen,” he said, and he winced, remembering.

  “How did she look?”

  He winced again. His name was Dougie. He wore rubber boots. He said, “She were deep in thought.”

  Dougie had seen something no one else had.

  “She were preoccupied. Her face were gray. She weren’t happy.”

  I said, “I thought she was happy about her new grandson.”

  Dougie disagreed. “I think she were worried about something. They do worry, you know. Aye, it’s a terrible job.”

  He began to walk slowly, as if in sympathy for the hard-pressed Queen.

  I said, “Being Queen of England has its compensations.”

  “Some compensations and some disadvantages,” Dougie said. “I say it’s half a dream world and half a nightmare. It’s a goldfish bowl. No privacy! She can’t pick her nose without someone seeing her.”

  Dougie said this in an anguished way, and I thought it was curious, though I did not say so, that he was pained because the monarch could not pick her nose without being observed.

  He then began to talk about television programs. He said his favorite program was “The Dukes of Hazzard,” which concerned high jinks in a town in the American South. This Scottish farm laborer in Fifeshire said that he liked it because of the way the character Roscoe talked to his boss. That was very funny. American humor was hard to understand at times, he said, but every farm laborer in Scotland would find Roscoe funny for his attitude.

  At last a bus came. I flagged it down. It was empty. I said I wanted to go to Anstruther to see the Queen.

  “Aye. She’s having lunch there,” the driver said.

  I wondered where.

  The driver knew. “At the Craw’s Nest. It’s a small hotel on the Pittenweem Road.”

  He dropped me farther along and I followed the bunting into Anstruther, sensing that same vibrant glow that I had felt at St. Andrews—the royal buzz. It was a holiday atmosphere. The schools were out. The shops were closed. The pubs were open. Some men were wearing kilts. People were talking in groups, seeming to remind one another of what had just happened—the Queen had already gone by, to the Craw’s Nest.

  I cut across the harbor sands and went up the road to what seemed a very ordinary hotel—but freshly painted and draped in lines of plastic Union Jacks. There were more men in kilts here—they had such wonderfully upright posture, the men in kilts: they never slouched and hardly ever sat down.

  “She’s just left,” one said. His name was Hector Hay McKaye.

  But there was something of her still here, like perfume that is strongest when a woman leaves suddenly. In the Queen’s case it was like something overhead—still up there, an echo.

  Mr. McKaye turned to his friends and said, “They had two detectives in the kitchen—”

  It seemed to me that if the Queen and Prince Philip had eaten here, the food might be good. I seldom had a good meal in my traveling, not that it mattered much: food was one of the dullest subjects. I decided to stay the night at the Craw’s Nest. And this hotel, which had just received the blessing of a Royal Visit, was a great deal cheaper than any hotel in Aberdeen.

  “She never had a starter,” the waitress Eira said. “She had the fish course, haddock Mornay. Then roast beef, broccoli, and carrots. And fresh strawberries and cream for dessert. Our own chef did it. It was a simple meal—it was good. The menu was printed and had bits of gold foil around it.”

  Much was made of the good plain food. It was English food—a fish course, a roast, two boiled vegetables, and fruit for the dessert course. The middle-class families in Anstruther—and everywhere else—had that every Sunday for lunch. She’s just like us, people said of the Queen; of course, she works a jolly sight harder!

  What was difficult for an alien to see was that this was essentially a middle-class monarchy. Decent philistines, the royal couple liked animals and country-house sports and variety shows. They never mentioned books at all, but they were famous for preferring certain television programs. Newspapers had published photographs of the Royal Television Set: it had a big screen and a sort of shawl on the top, but it was just like one you could hire for two quid a week up the High Street. Over the years the Queen had become shrewder-seeming, an even-tempered mother-in-law and a kindly gran. Prince Philip was loved for being irascible. He was noted for his grouchy remarks. He used the word bloody in public, and after that it was hard for anyone to find fault with him. The Queen was his opposite, growing smaller and squashier as he seemed to lengthen and grow spiky—the illusion had sprung out of his having become vocal. The Queen and the Prince were well matched, but it was less the sovereign and her consort than the double act that all successful middle-class marriages are.

  In the lobby they were selling souvenirs of the Royal Visit. How had they had time to prepare these paperweights and medallions and letter openers and postcards saying CRAW’S NEST HOTEL—SOUVENIR OF THE ROYAL VISIT?

  “We knew about it in January, but we had to keep it a secret until May,” Eira said. “We kept praying that nothing would go wrong. We thought the Falklands might finish it.”

  So they had been putting the place in order and running up souvenirs for almost seven months. The royal lunch had lasted an hour.

  That night they held a celebration party in the hotel parking lot. It was a way of giving thanks. The hotel invited the whole town, or rather two—Easter Anstruther and Wester Anstruther. They had a rock band and eight pipers and some drummers. The racket was tremendous and continued until two o’clock in the morning, hundreds of people drinking and dancing. They sold sausages and fish and chips, and there were bales of hay for people to sit on. The band was bad, but no one seemed to mind. There were old people, families, drunks, and dogs. Small boys smoked cigarettes in a delighted way and sneaked beer from the hotel. Girls danced with each other, because the village boys, too embarrassed to be seen dancing, congregated in small groups and pretended to be tough. There was a good feeling in the air, hilarity and joy, something festive, but also grateful and exhausted. It wasn’t faked; it was like the atmosphere of an African village enjoying itself.

  The cleaning ladies were buzzing early the next morning.

  “I couldn’t believe it,” Mrs. Ross said. “It didn’t seem real. It was like a dream.”

  I said, “What will Willi
e Hamilton think?”

  Willie Hamilton was their Member of Parliament and noted for being in favor of abolishing the monarchy.

  “Willie Hamilton can get stuffed.”

  Trippers

  ROSALIE AND HUGH MUTTON COLLECTED PRESERVED RAILWAYS. They had been on the Romney, Hythe, and Dym-church; 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. This North Norfolk Railway 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. Because of the railway strike all these trippers had come by car.

  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 groins, 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.