I grew a little tired of being asked to enjoy the romance of smuggling. Like smugglers today, they were vicious cheats and bullies, who sneaked at night and squealed when they were caught. I could not see them as harmless, and at the very least they were grubby and mendacious. But they were praised for their recklessness and their courage. Meanwhile, back at the South Goodwin lightship and on the Sussex coast and throughout the tight bays and coves of south Cornwall, men were still smuggling for a living. Illegal immigrants, seasick Pakistanis, and puking Bangladeshis were being sneaked ashore near Deal, and cigarettes into Broadstairs, and bootleg brandy into Cornwall from Brittany, "but don't tell anyone I told you," my source, Arthur Tulley, said.
It was twenty miles from Ventnor to Freshwater Bay, but it was an empty path. The fields were open and very wide, and the long hills had views for miles, so that approaching I could see the high wind from the Channel giving the wheat the look of a riptide, and, when it lessened to a breeze, silken currents were stirred in the tassels.
I walked to Freshwater Bay and kept walking, across Tennyson Down (the poet once lived nearby and so had the photographer Julia Margaret Cameron) to Needle Down and West High Down, the westernmost point of the Isle of Wight. There, a series of chalk columns rose out of the sea and were known to sailors as the Needles. There were parts of those downs which were nearly five hundred feet high, and I could easily see the sun setting behind Swanage, seventeen miles away. Then I walked back to Freshwater Bay, and there I stayed the night.
"I work about ten hours a day," Daphne Wrennell said at the Albion Hotel, "and I get an hour off in the morning and about three hours in the afternoon. Wednesdays are free. I'm from Wales — me mum's Welsh — we're all from somewhere different here at the Albion. I've been coming back here every year for the past four years to work. It's quite nice, really. I know it's not a real job, but you get two months off a year when the hotel's closed — no, we don't get paid for that. That's in the winter. I have a bit of rest then. I was thinking of doing some traveling next winter. I might go to Turkey. I always fancied Turkey. I got some brochures — it's not very expensive, is it? I was thinking of going alone. Think I should?"
I urged her to take a friend and gave her the usual cautions.
The sun was shining the next morning, so I decided to walk the back roads to Yarmouth. It seemed to me that there was little traffic on the island, but that the roads were so crooked and narrow the few cars were often held up, and the buses were so large they went slowly, causing obstructions. I was told that it was possible to whip around the island in an hour and a half, but that the buses prevented this.
"In my youth, we used to call those 'sharabangs,'" a man told me. We had stopped to watch a bus that had become jammed against a curve in order to let a horse and buggy go past. Querying faces with white noses and eyeglasses appeared at the windows of the bus.
"Sharabangs," the man repeated. This was Francis Pitchford, an accountant from Surrey. He had a cottage here and would be retiring to it soon. As I listened to him on the road that morning, it struck me that many people who appeared to be reminiscing were actually gloating or boasting, or even lying.
"I can remember," Mr. Pitchford said, "the two-tier buses, very big ones, drawn by horses. Now that shows you how old I am."
But he was not very old, certainly not much over sixty — and that was nothing to boast about. I did not believe him, but I kept my mouth shut, and I let him say, "Oh, this was way before your time, young fellow."
There was a kind of hostility in this, something like I've been here longer than you, a very English way of putting down a stranger, telling you that he was older than you were. I had heard Englishmen pretend to be older than they were in order to score a point. It was only the old in England who were allowed to be opinionated.
He was still grinning at the stranded bus when I walked on.
I saw a card in the window of a general store farther up the road. It said,
Catholics — Remember These Words?
IN NOMINE PATRIS ET FILII ET SPIRITU SANCTU…
followed by holy mass, which until a few years ago could be heard in every Catholic church in the land.
The same holy mass is still celebrated privately in Newport on the 3rd Sunday of the month.
Telephone: Newport 4220
It made the Latin mass seem like a secret ceremony, and indeed the tone of the note hinted at a clandestine service, calling up images of early Christians and whispered consecrations. I wondered if on the Isle of Wight there was not an old-style unreformed Catholicism taking hold, and I longed to know more. I found a public phonebox and dialed the number, but I got no reply. It was perhaps an example of my aimlessness that I would gladly have changed my plans and walked to Newport to find out about the secret Catholics if I had been able to raise anyone with the phone call.
The path through the woods to Yarmouth was straight and level; once it had been a railway line, and now it was a cinder track, used mostly by hackers. A large bird alighted on the path. I took out my binoculars and saw it was an English jay, Garrulus glandarius, large, beautifully colored, noisy, and very shy. It flew up suddenly, as if propelled by its harsh squawk. It had been startled by a young woman coming down the path toward me.
I knew she would be frightened of me. Two women had been murdered ("savagely") in some woods near Aldershot the day before. It had been reported by the papers and on the television news. These days everyone watched the news, because of the Falklands War, so there was an unusual consciousness of public events. It was not explained what "savagely" meant, but anyone could guess: a razor or a knife, probably; and the woman-hating slasher was almost certainly a solitary man with a plausible face, wearing old clothes, his weapon in his knapsack, and oily hiker's shoes on his feet — very likely a man like me, on a path like this.
She saw me and froze. I wanted to go another way, but there was a marsh beside the path, so I had to stick to this route and walk right past her. I tried to be jaunty, but that brought a look of terror to her face. She looked away, but there was an intensity in her alert movements that was like panic — she was not breathing; she was listening. She was about twenty-two and her fear had made her features very plain. I wanted to say: It's not me!
I said, "Good morning," as I passed her.
She mumbled something in a frightened voice. I felt sorry for her, and did her the favor of hurrying away. I looked back: she was running down the path toward Freshwater.
Yarmouth was a fine place, very small and solid, made of large stones the damp had turned green on the low pretty buildings, with proud streets and a little compact ruin of a castle ("The Arbella sailed from Yarmouth for Massachusetts in 1630"). It was a very private town on a cozy harbor and it had a long slender pier. It was an ancient place, almost as old as the island itself; it faced north. The ferry was just about to leave, so I jumped aboard.
It was here, on the Solent, that Tennyson wrote "Crossing the Bar," but in the morning it was hard to imagine "Sunset and evening star, / And one clear call for me!" and the poet recommending his soul to Heaven. The sun was sparkling on the water behind the yachts tipping toward Yarmouth — a Force Eight was blowing, and I could see the collapsed Hurst Castle to the west, jutting on a spit of land from Hampshire, its arches like a set of broken dentures. There was a lovely lighthouse beside it, a white pawn on the water.