The Kingdom by the Sea Read Free

1952, in Malaysia 1937, Afghanistan was 1910, and Bolivia 1949. It is twenty years ago in the Soviet Union, ten in Norway, five in France. It is always last year in Australia and next week in Japan. Britain and the United States were the present—but the present contains the future. A season of traveling with my eyes open in Great Britain, I thought, could not fail to show me what was to come. I was a little impatient with distant countries and past decades, but I was not necessarily looking for progress or invention. There was a deterioration and decay that seemed to me more futuristic than Utopian cities of steel and glass.
    And then an English friend of mine—just yapping—said, "The seaside belongs to everyone."
    I knew this was exactly right and that I wanted to leave immediately.
    ***
    I chose to travel on May Day. It was London's Labor Day, celebrated by marching union men and speeches in Trafalgar Square. But in some English villages a May Queen was chosen and crowned with a garland, and there was dancing around a Maypole while a watching know-it-all, Major Uprichard, leered at fifteen-year-old Tracey Rivett in her garland and said, "It's all phallic symbols, of course. Years ago, when we ran around painted with woad, these jollities turned into orgies. You see, the Maypole has a desperately obvious significance..."
    Recently, May Day had been renamed and politically neutralized as Spring Bank Holiday. In the south of England it was associated with a day trip to a coastal resort. It was traditionally a time when people headed for the beach, and since the fifties it had been the day when gangs of youths fought each other with clubs and chains, in Southend and Margate. The English were creatures of habit. And that was the reason I chose Margate.
    I left Waterloo East on the 11:33, and at Gravesend I put down my newspaper. Pocahontas—Mrs. John Rolfe—was buried at St. George's Church. The town bore the name Gravesend because, east of it, the dead had to be buried at sea. We approached the River Medway, the joined towns of Rochester and Chatham. My carriage was less than a third full, perhaps because it was a late train—or was it the low gray sky and the uncertain light? It was cool and damp; the weather forecast was "scattered showers"—it was the forecast for Britain nearly every day of the year. It was no day for the beach.
    There were four elderly people in this carriage. One was reading a paper with the headline MY BATTLE WITH DRUGS. Another old person had been saying as I passed, "It was one of those merciful releases—" There were three families, parents and children, neatly dressed for their outing. A bang outside brought a young woman squinting to the window, and her expression said: It sounded like a car backfiring—but that was what they always said about dangerous explosions these days. A little girl was laughing and gasping and holding a bottle of Tizer: "It went down the wrong way!"
    An Englishman across the aisle did an extraordinary thing for an Englishman. He asked me a question.
    He said, "Walking?"
    I was dressed for it—knapsack, all-purpose leather jacket, oily hiking shoes—and (because we were approaching the coast) I had my map unfolded. I was obviously a foreigner, which made his question a safe one. Class-consciousness tended to keep the English rather watchful and buttoned-up. But this was a Bank Holiday train to Margate. Class was hardly an issue here.
    Yes, I said, I was walking and also riding, depending on the weather.
    "The weather's been letting us down," he said. The weather in England was not a neutral topic. It was full of personification; it involved struggle and conflict. It could be wayward or spiteful, and then people said, "It's been trying to rain all day." Or it could be toiling on your behalf: "The sun's been trying to come out." Or, as the man said, it could be lazy and selfish; it could let you down. People imagined British weather