I passed the bundled-up old people on their benches, and the families with picnic baskets and balloons, the day-trippers waiting at the JUGS OF TEA FOR THE BEACH sign, and I walked out of Broadstairs and through a gate to a narrow park dedicated to the memory of George VI. The land was higher here, and on this sea cliff were magpies and dog-owners and kite-flyers. Down below were the original thirty-nine steps, leading to the sea.
On the other side of this park was Ramsgate.
The man on the train to Margate, Mr. Mould, had seemed to me to be boasting when he told me he was going to Ramsgate. Anyway, these towns on the Kent coast a few hours from London were either described as Cockneyfied or not very Cockneyfied — the less of it the better, people said, since London influence on the coast was always seen as contamination. The coast represented an escape from every terrestrial ill. The worst was metropolitan oppression, and London was the epitome of that. When Baedeker described Ramsgate as "a somewhat less Cockneyfied edition of Margate," it intended praise. That was in 1906, but even today such places were still measured by London, because London was the future and it was also pretty poisonous. When a coastal place was too big or too noisy or full of traffic — when it was inconvenient or ugly or it smelled — people said, "Just like London," in a helpless way, because now they were beside the sea and they couldn't go any farther.
Ramsgate was larger than but just as ugly as Margate, with a swimming pool on the Front that looked like a Roman ruin painted blue. It was the Marine Bathing Pool, which had been neglected and now lay vandalized and full of smashed chairs and broken glass. "The Council are at present discussing future development," the sign beside it said, but one could not read that without thinking of dynamite.
I had been hurrying. My hamstrings ached. I asked a man in a flat cap where the railway station was. He was grateful to me for asking directions and offered me three different routes; the station was some distance away.
His name was Len Shottery. He said, "Are you walking it?"
I said yes.
"It's much too far to walk," he said. "Get in — I'll drive you."
Mr. Shottery climbed into the cab of his Department of Public Works truck. He had been out all day, putting out plastic cones to reroute traffic for tomorrow's ditch-digging. He said he was a Londoner. "I came down here five years ago and haven't been back once." He was about fifty years old and he said this with the air of a man who has fled to the South Pacific.
"Watch them trains," Mr. Shottery said. "They're not very clever on a holiday."
I took the train nine miles to Sandwich and walked around the town. It was hardly bigger than Sandwich, Massachusetts, but it was a lovely place surrounded by flat green fields. It had survived and was still pretty and old-fangled, because in the course of eight hundred years this coastal town had slipped inland and was no longer a great port. It had just closed up, and now it was preserved, two miles from the sea, in its own rich silt. "Queen Elizabeth visited the town in 1572, and the house is occupied in Strand Street," and there I saw a man with a frightened face walking a tottering dog.
My idea was to walk to Deal, which was only five miles away. German prisoners of war had built the Sandwich-to-Deal road and cycle path, in 1946, before they were repatriated from their prison camp at Eythome. I wanted to hike this road, but my legs ached from my hurrying, so I took an evening train.
I arrived in Deal in a glarey sunset. It was very quiet here, very empty, and I liked it for smelling of fish and seaweed. Everyone had gone home — into the house or back to London. The seafront was just rope and hauled-up fishing dinghies, and the wind was blowing along the stony shingly shore. Now the sea and the sky were blue. I sat down. The sun was like a carbuncle. I decided to stay.
At no point in three months of travel did I have a reservation in advance at a hotel or a guest house. I wanted to come and go as I pleased and not be held to specific places and dates. I thought: If I can't get a room, I'll move on to another place and look — but that was never necessary. I never found a hotel that was full, though I found many that were completely empty. I was never turned away. Some of the hotel-owners or guest house proprietors were embarrassed by their empty rooms. Some said it was too early in the season. "We'll be packed in June," they said in May. But in June they said, "Things are quiet now, but it'll be a madhouse in July, when the school holidays start." In July they said, "In August we're always fully booked." But the season deepened, and they were nearly always empty. Some of the owners said that people had stopped traveling in Britain — they went to Spain when they went at all. Some said, "It's this recession. It's a worldwide problem." Some people said, "We're not a rich country anymore. We're poor"; but that attitude made me wary, because those were the people who always overcharged me.
My method for finding a place to stay was to walk up and down the streets and look for a clean or well-shaped building that had a view of the sea. I avoided the new hotel (too expensive) or the place in which I heard music playing (too noisy) or the damp tumbledown inn with the swaybacked roof that was usually buried in a back lane (stinks and hard beds). The tall semi-hotel I found in Deal after roaming around for twenty minutes looked all right — it had lovely windows — but after I gained entrance I saw it was no good. It smelled of bacon and beer, and it was run by a fat dirty woman named Mrs. Sneath, who smoked in my face.
"Cheapest single room I have is ten pounds," Mrs. Sneath said. "That's bed and full breakfast."
"Your sign says the rooms start at seven pounds."
"I don't have any left, do I," she said.
"I'll take a ten-pound one."
"With tax that's eleven pounds fifty," she said, writing out the bill, "in advance. Make your check out to M. Sneath. You were well away," she went on, speaking to another woman who was sitting lamely on a bar stool, with a small glass of lager.
"I was drinking gin," this other woman said. Her name was Mrs. Feeley. She was Irish, and though she was speaking with Mrs. Sneath, she kept looking at me in a friendly way and seemed always to be on the verge of asking me where I was from, and then saying that she had wanted to go there her whole life.
"I was on shorts," Mrs. Sneath said. "I thought that band were smashing, and all that food. Gillows did the catering. I stuffed myself with smoked salmon and those bits of ham rolled around the pineapple chunks with the toothpick through them. Rum don't give you a hangover, and I always drink lots of water. Don't gin make you cry?"
"Only sometimes," Mrs. Feeley said.
"I hadn't been to a wedding for ages," Mrs. Sneath said.
"They don't get married as much as they used to. They just seem to live together until they get sick of each other." Mrs. Feeley smiled at me, but she was still addressing Mrs. Sneath. "We had a marvelous wedding, Jerry and me. I was paralytic. They don't do that anymore. It's the pill."
Mrs. Sneath did not reply. She was staring at me and compressing her cigarette in her yellow lips. "You're in nineteen. Top of the stairs, last door on the right. The loo is down the hall. Breakfast's at nine."
"I wanted to be away at eight," I said.
"Bloody crack of dawn," she said.
"I'm walking to Dover," I said.
"Dover's lovely," Mrs. Feeley said in her friendly way. She was fleshy and full of encouragement. She said, "But it used to be much prettier than it is now."
"Breakfast's at nine," Mrs. Sneath said and wrung the sweat from her palms by clutching her filthy shift. She blinked the smoke out of her eyes and gave me an Eskimo squint and said, "If I made exceptions I'd be doing breakfasts all the morning. It's a proper cooked breakfast, see, that's why I'm not cheap."