But it was also a problem of itinerary. In a place that was crisscrossed with ant trails, a kingdom of bottlenecks and private property and high fences, my route was a problem, because there were too many routes. To take all the trains would be no more than a mediocre stunt. The buses did not go to enough places. A bicycle was out — too dangerous, too difficult; another stunt. A car was too simple, and anyway I had lived in London long enough to know that driving on English roads was no fun. My route was crucial. It was the most important aspect of travel. In choosing a route, one was choosing a subject. But every mile of Britain had a road through it; there was a track across every field, a footpath in every acre of woods. Perhaps this was why I had never traveled in Britain: I had been unable to decide on the route.
And then I had my way: narrowly, around the entire coast.
It answered every need. There was only one coast, it was one undeviating route, and this way I would see the whole of Britain. In many respects, Britain was its coast — nowhere in Britain was more than sixty-five miles from the sea. Nearly the whole of the coast was unknown to me. And so as soon as I decided on this coastal route for my itinerary, I had my justification for the trip — the journey had the right shape; it had logic; it had a beginning and an end; and what better way was there to see an island than circumambulating its coast?
The greatest advantage in this tour was that a country tended to seep to its coast: it was concentrated there, deposited against its beaches like the tidewrack from the sea. People naturally gravitated to the coast, and they wore fewer clothes there — it was normal on the coast to be seminaked, exposed.
The best trains — the slow, sweet branch lines — plied the coast. Many of these branch lines were doomed. Some people said that none would be left in ten years, and most people agreed that the impending railway strike, planned for the early summer, would kill the branch lines. There were also the green buses — I had sometimes seen them filling a country lane, but I had never ridden on one. And there were footpaths.
I had an impression that there was a continuous footpath that went around the whole coastline of Great Britain. Every part of the coast I had seen so far had had such a footpath. Usually it was a muddy twelve-inch path, with a brisk figure approaching in plus fours and thick-soled shoes and a crackling plastic mackintosh, and carrying a bag of sandwiches and an Ordnance Survey Map. I imagined this person to be just another feature of the British coast, like the old gun emplacements and the iron piers and the wooden groynes and the continuous and circling footpath. But if there was not a footpath around the kingdom, there was certainly a beach, and I could walk along the beach — from Fishguard to Aberystwyth, for example, where there was no connecting train. I would try to walk as much as possible; I would take trains if they were interesting lines or if the weather was bad; and if I had to, I would take buses. It was so easy to speed through this country, I would have to make strict rules in order to slow myself down.
"England resembles a ship in its shape," Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote in English Traits. He was wrong: books by pious aliens were full of kindnesses of this sort. England, of course, resembles a pig with something on its back. Look at it. It is a hurrying pig; its snout is the southwest in Wales, and its reaching trotters are Cornwall, and its rump is East Anglia. The whole of Britain looks like a witch riding on a pig, and these contours — rump and snout and bonnet, and the scowling face of western Scotland — were my route.
No British journey could be original. Daniel Defoe had done the whole of Britain by road, William Daniell and Richard Ayton had sailed around it, William Cobbett had gone throughout the south of England on horseback, and more recently H. V. Morton and J. B. Priestley had gone in search of England, banging up and down in the thirties and forties. There were Britain-by-train books and Britain-by-bus books and books about cycling around. Some people had walked around Britain and written about it. The most impressive recent hike was that of a man who had walked every inch of the coastline. It was seven thousand miles, but he had been in a hurry. He had done it in ten months and practically walked his legs off — gave himself two severe pressure fractures in his leg bones. I had read his book. The trouble with travel stunts was that the trick was the thing; it was all a form of tightrope-walking, and the performer never took his eyes off his own feet.
I wanted to look around and see Britain for myself. I did not intend a stunt or a test of strength or a public display. In fact, quite the opposite; and later, tramping the coastal path or riding the slow trains, I sometimes felt like the prince in the old story, who, because he distrusts everything he has been told and everything he has read, disguises himself in old clothes and, with a bag slung over his back, hikes the muddy roads, talking to everyone and looking closely at things, to find out what his kingdom is really like.
***
And I wanted to see the future. Travel is so often an experiment with time. In third world countries I felt I had dropped into the past, and I had never accepted the notion of timelessness anywhere. Most countries had specific years. In Turkey it was always 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.