"I'll have to ask," Mr. Hawtree said.
He returned a few minutes later and said, "The old feller says you can just make it if you hurry. Otherwise you'll be caught by the tide."
I began to speak, but he shooed me away, saying, "Don't hang about!"
I set off, jumping from rock to rock. The fossils were visible on the rock surfaces — petrified snails on one slab and fossilized fish on another. All these rocks had tumbled from the cliff, and there was no law against hacking them to pieces, looking for an ichthyosaurus (the first one was found near here in 1811). But I did not pause. Lyme was shining gently above its stone pier. Behind me I could see where I had walked all the way from the Chesil Bank and Weymouth. The Isle of Portland was indistinct and blubberlike; it could have been a whale that had blundered against the Dorset coast to die.
Because of the tide, I was the only person on this stretch of beach. It was deserted and full of cracks and corners — another of the places where I expected to find a corpse: a murder victim, a suicide, or more likely someone who had accidentally drowned and been washed ashore. I had never had this spooky feeling in a wild country, in Africa or Asia, but on the British coast, whenever I was in a lonely place, I looked down and expected to see a dead man.
The tide was high near Lyme, washing against the cement slope of the seawall. There was room to walk, but the wall was covered in green sea slime, so it was very slippery. I crossed it on all fours and at Lyme I felt as if I had won a close race.
"That's where they made that film," a shuffling gent named Beaver said, and he smiled at the Cobb, remembering the film he had seen up in Swindon, where he lived. He had motored down to Lyme with the wife. He was not sure where he was headed. At his age, he said, you lived one day at a time. He wasn't thinking of retirement yet and certainly did not want to move to an elephants' graveyard, as he called Bournemouth and Worthing and the other places where oldies were clinging to the coast. But the grandchildren were in the Midlands, and the wife didn't drive.
Ellen Beaver said, "She was ever so pretty," thinking of the American actress who had stood on the Cobb in the movie.
"It looks just the same!" Tom Oscott said, also smiling at the stone pier. The Golatelys and the Frekes were also staring.
There was no glamour like the glamour of a movie, and this fairly tedious and pretentious romance set in Lyme Regis had succeeded where Persuasion had failed, and that year Lyme Regis was associated with an American actress named Meryl Streep rather than with Jane Austen.
The town itself was a sort of Regency bottleneck, a continuous line of traffic squeezed between tea shops and coaching inns. The town was one of the many on the British coast that, delicately made and appearing to defy gravity, seemed magnetized to its steep cliffs. I spent my time there walking along the Undercliff, a strange landscape feature caused by a great landslip in 1839—twenty acres subsided and a seaside ravine opened, known as the Chasm. It was full of flowers and fossils, and it was protected, a little wooded preserve, between the cliffs and the sea. After a day of scrambling along the slippery Undercliff, I found a house on the way to Yawl with a VACANCIES sign in the window.
This was the Skeats'. "We do bed and breakfast," Margaret Skeat said.
Vesta Skeat was thirteen and sneaked lipstick when her mother was not looking. She had a loud laugh and marble-white skin and a T-shirt that said Adam and the Ants.
"Is that all the clobber you have?" she said, standing in the doorway of my room as I unslung my knapsack. Other guests had had sleeping bags, some had tents, one had about five pairs of shoes. Vesta picked her elbow and told me she hated school.
"You're the bed-and-breakfast man," Vesta Skeat then said.
"That's me," I said.
Vesta widened her eyes and said, "Madness!"
Her mother screamed her name. Vesta said softly, "Shut up, you silly cow," and then winked at me and went obediently downstairs.
I locked the door. Bed-and-breakfast man? Madness? She was referring to a pop song about a tramp who traveled from house to house, sleeping on sofas, and it was sung by the group who called themselves Madness.
The next day I took a country bus to Axminster. It was not far, but I had a train to catch. A man getting off the bus offered his newspaper to the driver. It was the Sun, with a Falklands headline: THIS IS IT! — suggesting that an invasion of the islands by the British was imminent and that it would soon result in a recapture of the territory.
The bus driver said, "That's a Tory paper."
"I'm through with it," Mr. Lurley said.
Dan, the bus driver, said, "I don't want it."
"Why not?" Mr. Lurley said.
"Tory paper!"
"They're all the same," Mr. Lurley said, and left it on the little shelf under the windshield with Dan's lunch bag (two cheese and chutney sandwiches, a small over-ripe tomato, and a Club Biscuit).
Dan picked up the newspaper and threw it out the bus door.
"They're not the bloody same," he said. "That's a Tory paper."
This was up the road from Yawl on the way to Axminster, in the middle of the English countryside, the Conservative passenger, and the socialist behind the wheel.
We traveled through the softly sloping meadows of Devon. A sign on every seat in the bus said, LOWER YOUR HEAD WHEN LEAVING YOUR SEAT, because there was a danger of banging your head on the luggage rack.
To get to what was formerly the Great Western Railway, I bought a ticket at Axminster. This line had once been the London and South-Western Railway. All these railways had been trimmed and made smaller and cheaper. I rode to Exeter ("The town was stormed by the Danes in 876… It was wantonly attacked from the air in 1942, when 40 acres, including many ancient buildings, were destroyed") and then changed to a train for Dawlish, on the line once known as the Great Way Round.
This track was laid by the engineering genius Isambard Kingdom Brunei on the very edge of the English coast. He had had to build stone embankments and tunnels — he had reshaped the coast. The line was a combination of slow curves and high-speed straights, surf on one side, cliffs on the other, five miles of excitement. And even along the River Exe it was an experience — the racing train and the river's tide slipping down, thunder and water, and then the bright light of the ocean bathing the train between tunnels.
Dawlish looked wonderful as the train drew in, with the rain falling softly on the station platform on the sea. The platform was like a pier. But when I got out and the train drew away, I saw that Dawlish was small and dull. I asked a man about the hotels here and he said, "I don't know as much as I should about Dawlish," which was precisely what a man had said to me about Dungeness.
I walked down the wet road to Holcombe to Took at the standing rocks at Holcombe Head called the Parson and Clerk, another set of dragon's teeth like Old Harry and His Wife and the Needles. I ambled along the seawall toward Teignmouth, and every so often a train would shoot past me and wet me and nearly blow me into the ocean. I thought that the train on the rocky shore, rolling through a storm, was one of the most beautiful sights in the world. I came to Teignmouth.
"You're alone?" Mrs. Starling said at the Victory Guest House, glancing at my knapsack, my leather jacket, my oily shoes.
"So far," I said.
"I'll show you to your room," she said, a little rattled by my reply.
I was often warmed by a small thrill in following the younger landladies up four flights to the tiny room at the top of the house. We would enter, breathless from the climb, and stand next to the bed somewhat flustered, until she remembered to ask for the £5 in advance — but even that was ambiguous and erotic.
Most of them said You're alone? or Just a single, then? I never explained why. I said I was in publishing. I said I had a week off. I said I liked to walk. I did not say that I had no choice but to travel alone, because I was taking notes and stopping everywhere to write them. I could think clearly only when I was alone, and then my imagination began to work as my mind wandered. They might have asked: How can you bear your own company? I would have had to reply: Because I talk to myself — talking to myself has always been part of my writing and, by the way, I've just been walking along the seawall from Dawlish in the rain muttering, "Wombwell…warm-well… nutwell… cathole…"