and compared it to the way some birdbrains kicked the yellow chalk cliffs apart, broke them like crockery and threw the shards onto the Promenade, I concluded that man did more damage than the tides. Outside Margate, the cliffs were broken, and initials and names and dates gouged into them; they had been hacked and scorched. This was the result of the boisterous spirits of the roaming gangs that visited the town and found there was not enough to do there. They also wrote with the chalk: MADNESS, it said on the Promenade — it was homage to a pop group — and PUNX and I WANT TO SKREW YOU.
I climbed some stairs that passed through a "gate" — a cut — in the chalk cliffs and then walked along the path at the top to Cliftonville. This was a sedate suburb of Margate, full of small damp bungalows and ragged sparrows. A hawk flew slowly near the edge of the cliff, and gulls nagged nearer the sea. It was not quiet, what with the gulls and the surf sighing and the wind scraping the hedges, but it was noisy in a peaceful way.
Many signs said DANGEROUS CLIFFS and warned walkers not to go too close to the edge. The chalk was collapsing, and I could see that large bluffs had toppled to the shore. It reminded me that in the few coastal parts of Britain where I had hiked, there had been signs warning of breaking cliffs and unsafe paths. What I had seen of the Dorset coast was slipping into the Channeclass="underline" portions of pasture land and meadows had fallen, and the fences had gone with them in a tangle of posts and wire. These chalk cliffs of Kent — so white and sturdy when seen from a distance — were frail and friable, and this coast made Britain seem like a country consisting of stale cake that softened and broke in the rain.
The rain was patchy. I saw through its drapes two blind men — one black, one white — being led along the path by two sighted ladies. The black man said, "Just how wide is it?" The white one said, "The dogs need a little space to play." A pair of dogs trotted behind this party, and the men tapped their canes as they went past me. Farther on, I heard music. It was "We'll Gather Lilacs in the Spring Again," being played by a man seated at an organ in an open-air amphitheater. The wind whipped at the folding chairs around him and made their canvas flutter and flap. There were more than five hundred chairs, and all of them were empty. The man went on playing and pulling out stops while the chairs flapped under the gray sky. I continued down the path, along the cloud-mottled water of the sea, and on this drab afternoon I heard a nightingale singing in a hedge. "The nightingale sings of adulterous wrong." T. S. Eliot was here having a mild nervous breakdown in 1921, staying at the Albemarle Hotel right over there in Cliftonville.
The sun came out as I walked along the North Foreland, past Kingsgate with its small pretty cove and its modern castle on one bluff, and a handsome lighthouse like a white peppermill just behind it on a higher point of land. There were cooing doves in the trees, and the high box hedges of the big houses were like fortifications.
Only four miles from Margate and it was the England of fresh paint and flower gardens and tall chimneys. And there was a clearer intimation of this area's respectability: the road smelled of private schools — it was a certain kind of soap and a certain kind of cooking and the sound of young voices and laughter coming from the open windows of large rooms. An hour ago it had been Skinheads and chip shops and rain on Margate Sands, and now this breezy bourgeois headland in bright sunshine, as I approached Broadstairs. I thought: Mexico is one landscape — one visible thing — and all of Arabia is one thing; but I began to suspect that every mile of England was different.
Broadstairs was full of flesh-colored flowers. There were no Skinheads here, no Nazi slogans, no signs saying anarchy! — that was always a popular one in public toilets in England. There were about thirty Mods drinking cider on the Front, passing half-gallon bottles back and forth. These boys had removed their jackets and crash helmets and shirts, and they sat in the sun on the green park benches. There was no loud music, no honky-tonk at Broadstairs; the Front was genteel — the iron ornateness of Victorian porches.
"Charles Dickens lived in this house," the sign said on a brick house with a brick turret that was smack on the coastal path at the edge of Broadstairs. Dickens had said that Broadstairs beat "all watering-places into what the Americans call 'sky-blue fits.'" This residence had been given the name Bleak House, and in its gift shop it was possible to buy potholders and tea towels and key chains stamped Bleak House — Broadstairs. Upstairs, the novelist's desk and wash basin were on view and could be seen for a small charge. It was of particular interest to me that Dickens had written most of American Notes in this house. He sat at this desk and looked out that window and dipped this pen in that inkpot and wrote, "To represent me as viewing America with ill-nature, coldness or animosity, is merely to do a very foolish thing, which is always a very easy one."
There was a fortuneteller's shop on the Front at Broadstairs, with a sign saying OLANDAH CLAIRVOYANTE. She was said to be the wisest woman in Europe. A testimonial letter taped onto her window said, "Dear Olondo, Whenever I feel depressed, which is every day, I take your letter out and read it and feel so much better—"
Which is every day? I went into the shop. Olandah was seated behind a curtain. She wore a scarf on her head and what looked like stage make-up and beads. Her expression was full of weary suspicion and she stared with such seriousness, I thought she had terrible news for me.
She said, "Do you want a reading?"
I said yes. She took my hand loosely, as if weighing it to bite. She said I was far from home — had my knapsack and muddy shoes given her a clue? She said I was doing a very difficult thing, but if she was referring to traveling around Britain, perhaps she knew something I didn't, because I had not foreseen any difficulties. She said I was sensitive and artistic: perhaps a painter? "Couldn't draw a rabbit," I said. She said I was successful but that I tried to hide it. I was often in the company of strangers. Some of them would try to take advantage of me, but my character would overcome them.
All this she gathered by prodding the palm of my right hand and tracing her crimson fingernails on the lines I got from rowing a skiff in Cape Cod Bay.
"Do you see anything there about Northern Ireland?"
"Distant lands certainly. One of them might be Ulster."
"Do I survive in the end?"
"Oh, yes. You lead a healthy life. You are not a smoker, for example."
"Gave up a year ago. Pipe. I used to inhale it. I miss it sometimes like a dead friend."
"You have many friends," Olandah said, perhaps mishearing me. "But you tend to keep away from them. You keep yourself to yourself. You are very independent."
"Self-employed," I said. "One last query. Where am I going to sleep tonight?"
She stopped looking at my hand. She looked at my nose and said, "Not at home."
"What town — can you give me a hint?"
"I give character readings," Olandah said. "I don't give tourist information."
This cost me £7, which was about a pound more than it would have cost me to stay at a guest house, with bed and breakfast. Still, I was grateful for her encouragement and glad to have been reassured that I was going to survive.
Another sign in Broadstairs said, "Seven miles out to sea from this point lay the dreaded Goodwin Sands — the great ship swallower — considered by a great many seafarers to be the most dangerous stretch of water in the world." There were countless stories about the disasters and wrecks on the Goodwins. "Their ingurgitating property is such, that a vessel of the largest size, driven upon them, would in a few days be swallowed up and seen no more." What was not so well known was that at the turn of the century, at low water, the sands became very firm and cricket matches were played on them.