I found three ladies having tea in the Regency Building. Daphne Bunsen, from Bradford, said, "We don't talk about this Falklands business here, 'cause we're on holiday. It's a right depressing soobject."
"Anyway," Mavis Hattery said, "there's only one thing to say."
What was that?
"I say, 'Get it over with! Stop playing cat and mouse!'"
Mrs. Bunsen said they loved Butlin's. They had been here before and would certainly come back. Their sadness was they could not stay longer. "And Mavis' room is right posh!"
"I paid a bit extra," Mrs. Hattery said. "I have a fitted carpet in my shally."
It was easy to mock Butlin's for its dreariness and its brainless pleasures. It was an inadequate answer to leisure, but there were scores of similar camps all around the coast, so there was no denying its popularity. It combined the security and equality of prison with the vulgarity of an amusement park. I asked children what their parents were doing. Usually the father was playing billiards and the mother was shopping, but many said their parents were sleeping — having a kip. Sleeping until noon, not having to cook or mind children, and being a few steps away from the chippy, the bar, and the betting shop — it was a sleazy paradise in which people were treated more or less like animals in a zoo. In time to come, there would be more holiday camps on the British coast—"Cheap and cheerful," Daphne Bunsen said.
Butlin's was staffed by "Redcoats" — young men and women who wore red blazers. It was a Redcoat named Rod Firsby who told me that the camp could accommodate fourteen thousand people ("but nine thousand is about average"). Where did the people come from? I asked. He said they came from all over. It was when I asked him what sorts of jobs they did that he laughed.
"Are you joking, sunshine?" he said.
I said no, I wasn't.
He said, "Half the men here are unemployed. That's the beauty of Butlin's — you can pay for it with your dole money."
***
After Butlin's, my boardinghouse in the lower town seemed very tame. There were thirteen fragrant old ladies in residence for a week. They gushed about places like Wimbleball Reservoir and Clatworthy and Dunkery Beacon and the castle at Dunster. Sometimes they mentioned Lorna Doone in respectful tones. But they had read the novel. They were retired Welsh schoolteachers, very sweet-natured and precise and knowledgeable.
One night I watched Damien-Omen II with eight of them in the so-called T.V. Lounge — the back parlor, with extra chairs. I was astonished at the silliness of the movie, but I looked around the room and saw that the Welsh ladies were squinting seriously at it. It was so preposterous, I wanted to hoot. The Devil's son was somehow living with an American family — the fact that they were obscenely rich and living like lords in Chicago was supposed to make it believable. The Devil's son had flinty eyes and went to a military academy, where periodically he reverted to his devilish self, calling down Satan's wrath on the school bullies. There was often a shiny crow overhead, croaking and doing damage — wreaking havoc was how one was supposed to view it. Nothing in this plot made me regret that I had missed Omen I, but because I had missed it, I had to ask questions of the Welsh ladies. I always got prompt replies.
"Who is that man?"
"One of the Devil's Disciples," Miss Ellis said, with a slewed Welsh emphasis on the last syllable.
Some of the ladies were knitting. One read a newspaper during the commercial breaks. They chatted about Wimbleball and Dunster. But they were silent during the movie. Only I spoke up — because I was confused.
"What's that statue?"
"Oh, that will be the Whore of Babylon, I expect," Miss Thomas said in her sweet Welsh voice.
The little brat had 666 inscribed on his scalp.
"That's the Number of the Beast," Miss Ellis said.
But I hadn't asked.
"Revelations," Miss Parry-Williams said.
Toward midnight, after most of the characters had been murdered by the Devil's son, the film ended. The parlor was now filled with the syrupy smell of the Welsh ladies' cologne. They stifled yawns and stood up.
Miss Thomas said, "I shouldn't be a bit surprised if we saw Omen Three before very long! Good night, Gwyneth; good night, Alice: good night—"
***
The schoolteachers made me impatient to see Wales. They looked English, but their demeanor was amused and remote. They whispered at breakfast, they were very polite, even circumspect; they behaved as though in a foreign land.
There was no path on this stretch of coast to Bristol. I put my maps aside and took the West Somerset Railway. It was Britain's longest private line — twenty-five miles, operating between Minehead and Taunton. The British Rail service had ended in 1971. The West Somerset line was both a passion and a business for the people who ran it; some were volunteers. The station at Minehead had been preserved as a sort of usable antique, full of nostalgic signs advertising cigarettes and motor oil. That aspect — the backward-looking part of it — rather irritated me. The trouble with railway buffs was that they were not really interested in going anywhere. They were playing — taking photographs, posing on locomotives, collecting engine numbers. They relished the dusty aesthetics of railway lore.
They especially liked dressing up. That seemed to be part of the English character — entering into fantasy, putting on different clothes, and setting the old dull personality aside. It was what made amateur dramatics in England so energetic; drag acts here were so humorous that they did not need the justification of being wholesome. And so much of English life required costumes — clothes represented freedom or power or a new self. The members of the House of Lords wore ermine, and Oxbridge students wore robes, and even milkmen wore distinctive leather jerkins; and there was no more serious boast than a bowler hat. It was the railway buff who crossed the thin line between dressing up and travesty — the English seldom bothered to make much of a distinction between the two in any case. The reward for restarting a railway line was the chance to dress up as a Stationmaster or a Conductor or a Guard or even a Sweeper — with a uniform and special buttons and a distinct kind of hat.
The train was full of joy-riders pretending to be passengers; there and back, that was always the railway buff's itinerary. They liked the atmosphere. They took pictures of each other and of the woodwork and steam. We went along the shore to Dunster and its dark brown castle ("The Dutch embossed leather hangings are outstanding"), then on to Watchet, turning inland for Williton. Still the railway buffs snapped pictures and marveled at the old signs—"Woodbines" and "Pratt's Motor Spirit" and "Craven 'A'—Will Not Affect Your Throat." I gathered that these signs excited memories of the old days, when there were hundreds of trains like this rattling through the English hills. At just the point where the railway buff's excitement was at its most feverish ("Crikey, Rafe, don't it take you back?"), and they began unpacking sandwiches from their hampers and setting up their thermos flasks of hot tea, the train stopped at Bishops Lydeard and everyone was ordered out. We were put onto a bus and taken in silence to Taunton. So the West Somerset Railway was something like Butlin's Holiday Camp — lots of razzmatazz but not much substance. Somehow it was not the answer to the transport need in that part of Somerset.