That was it, more or less. I had been to Brighton so many times, I had no desire to linger. Much better, I thought, to push on to Bognor, where I had never been. But I had someone to see in Brighton — Jonathan Raban was there on his boat, the Gosfield Maid, moored at Brighton Marina, just beyond Kemp Town and the nudist beach ("Bathing Costumes Are Not Required to Be Worn Past This Sign"). Jonathan had said that he was taking a trip around the British coast and was planning to write a book about it. This interested me. All trips are different, and even two people traveling together have vastly different versions of their journey. Jonathan was doing his coastal tour counterclockwise, stopping at likely ports in his boat.
He seemed contented on his boat. He had framed prints and engravings on the walls, and Kinglake's Eothen was open on a table under a porthole. It was strange to see a typewriter and a TV set on board, but that was the sort of boat it was, very comfy and literary, with bookshelves and curios.
"This must be your log," I said, glancing down. The entries were sketchy ("…light rain, wind ESE…") — nothing very literary here, no dialogue, no exclamation marks.
He said, "I keep planning to make notes, but I never seem to get round to it. What about you?"
"I fiddle around," I said. It was a lie. I did nothing but make notes, scribbling from the moment I arrived in a hotel or a guest house and often missing my dinner. I hated doing it. It was a burden. But if I had been in Afghanistan, I would have kept a detailed diary. Why should I travel differently in Britain?
I said, "I hate Brighton. I think there's a kind of wisdom in that — the British person, or even the foreigner, who says simply, 'I hate Brighton.' What's there to like here? It's a mess."
"Yes, it's a mess," Jonathan said. "That's one of the things I like about it."
"I've never seen so many dubious-looking people," I said.
He said, "It's full of tramps," and he smiled again. Then he said that the most unexpected things happened in Brighton. He would be walking along and he would see someone dressed up as Cardinal Wolsey or Robin Hood, or musicians, or people singing and having a grand time.
I said I saw only bums and day-trippers and people trying to, um, extricate from the long day the grain of pleasure.
We decided to have lunch in the center of Brighton, and so took the little train that rattled from the Marina, past the nudist beach, to the Aquarium. The nudist beach was mostly naked men staring hard at each other. This created heavy traffic on that part of the Front. We were pestered by a man with a monkey when we got off the train. I kept wanting to say: See what I mean?
"I had my parents on the boat for a week," Jonathan said in the restaurant.
Odd sort of voyage, I thought — Mum and Dad on his thirty-foot boat, hardly enough room to swing a cat in the galley, no privacy, rough seas, typewriter skittering sideways, all of them sleeping in the same small area, "Are you sure you won't have another fish finger, son?" and "I'm going to use the toilet, if no one has any objection."
That was how I imagined it.
"Who was the captain?" I asked. I knew that Jonathan's father was a clergyman, and it seemed to me that a clergyman was apt to take command.
"I was in charge," Jonathan said. "After all, it's my boat."
He said his book would be about all the places he had known and lived in on the British coast — a dozen or more.
I said that I wanted to write a book about all the places I had never seen before, which was most of the British coast.
At last, I said I had to be moving on.
"Where to?"
"Bognor," I said.
"Good old Bognor," he said. "So you're headed down the Promenade."
"Right," I said. It was a lovely afternoon.
He said he would be sailing toward Rye in a day or so and then to Dover and up the east coast.
"Watch out for the Goodwin Sands," I said. I told him what I had heard in Broadstairs, how they swallowed ships.
We shook hands and went our separate ways — Jonathan to fight the gales, and I to go down the Prom toward Bognor. Some trip, I thought, as I sauntered along the Promenade. But I was learning things and getting fresh air, and someday I would be too old for this and would be taken for a tramp if I tried it. Even now people sniffed and tried not to stare. A man of forty with a knapsack could easily be a serious crank.
***
As I strolled, I could see that Hove was low spirits and lawns, and the monotonous frenzy of Brighton gave way to clean old houses and rather spent pensioners. The Front, which had been more or less continuous since Margate, was breezy, but now I knew — because I had left it and walked on — that Brighton's chief characteristic was the youthfulness of its visitors: the young had made it seem aimless and wasteful. Hove was not that way.
Hove, like many other places on the English coast, had chalets. The name was misleading. They were huts, and chalet was mispronounced to suit them: "shally," the English said, an appropriate word made out of shanty and alley. There were hundreds of them shoulder to shoulder along the Front. They had evolved from bathing machines, I guessed. The English were prudish about nakedness (and swimming for the Victorians had been regarded as the opposite of a sport — it was a sort of immersion cure, a cross between colonic irrigation and baptism). The bathing machine — a shed on a pair of wheels — had been turned into a stationary changing room, and then arranged in rows on the beachfront, and at last had become a miniature house — a shally.
Hove's shallys were the size of English garden sheds. I looked into them, fully expecting to see rusty lawnmowers and rakes and watering cans. Sometimes they held bicycles, but more often these one-room shallys were furnished like doll houses or toy bungalows. You could see what the English considered essential to their comfort for a day at the beach. They were painted, they had framed prints (cats, horses, sailboats) on the wall and plastic roses in jam-jar vases. All had folding deck chairs inside and a shelf at the rear on which there was a hotplate and a dented kettle and some china cups. They were fitted out for tea and naps — many had camp cots, plastic cushions, and blankets; some had fishing tackle; a few held toys. It was not unusual to see half a fruitcake, an umbrella, and an Agatha Christie inside; and most held an old person, looking flustered.
All the shallys had numbers, some very high numbers, testifying to their multitude. But the numbers did not distinguish them, for they all had names: Seaview, the Waves, Sunny Hours, Bide-a-Wee, picked out on their doors or else lettered on plaques. They had double doors; some looked more like horse boxes than cottages. They had curtains. They had folding panels to keep out the wind. Many had a transistor radio buzzing, but the shally people were old-fashioned — they actually were the inheritors of the bathing-machine mentality — and they called their radios "the wireless" or even "my steam radio."
They were rented by the year, or leased for several years, or owned outright — again, like bathing machines. But they were thoroughly colonized. They had small framed photographs of children and grandchildren. When it rained, their occupiers sat inside with their knees together, one person reading, the other knitting or snoozing, always bumping elbows. In better weather they did these things just outside, a foot or so from the front door. I never saw a can of beer or a bottle of whiskey in a shally. The shally people had lived through the war. They had no money but plenty of time. They read newspapers, and that day everyone looked as if he were boning up for an exam on the Falklands campaign. It was becoming a very popular war.